Following a meeting of Anglican primates at Canterbury, the US Episcopal Church has been drummed out of the Anglican communion.
Said communion thereby lost almost two million communicants, which has to be a serious matter. The reason for the split was also serious: homosexuality or, to be more specific, the Episcopalians’ permissive attitude to it.
This is the culmination of an old problem that became apparent in 2003, when the Episcopal Church consecrated a practising homosexual as Bishop of New Hampshire. The Anglican Church doesn’t require celibacy from either prelates or parish priests, but an open practice of perversion was hard to swallow, as it were.
It has taken the Anglicans 12 years to muster sufficient resolve, but now the Episcopal Church has been suspended.
In the process, the primates also refused to endorse homomarriage, constituting as it does a “fundamental departure from the faith and teaching” of Christianity. Marriage to them is still unfashionably a union between a man and a woman, not any two or more mammals of the male, female or other sex. So far so good.
Then the fun started. For Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, saw fit to apologise to the homosexual ‘community’ for the measure and the meeting’s general tenor, of which contextually he disapproved.
“I want to take this opportunity,” he grovelled, “to say how sorry I am for the hurt and pain, in the past and present, the church has caused.”
Without pointing fingers or naming names, the Archbishop blamed the hurt and the pain on the conservative African bishops and some British fossils, who remain uncomfortably stubborn in their upholding of Christian doctrine:
“[This] makes us look out of line in the US and UK… but not in many other parts of the world… there are different views in different places.”
Different people in different places are indeed entitled to their own views. But they aren’t entitled to their own doctrine, which, for old times’ sake, is supposed to be universal.
His Grace doesn’t seem to realise this, as he fails to understand a few other fundamentals too. Exactly what line is the Anglican Church out of in the US and UK?
The line drawn in the sand by homosexual activists and our governing subversive spivs who crave the image of leftie, populist ‘cool’? If so, and this is the only line that fits the context, the world’s top Anglican prelate clearly thinks the Church must take its cue from every secular fad, no matter how pernicious and perverse.
Not everyone has to be a believing Christian, but one would think this a job requirement for an archbishop. Hence His Grace is institutionally required to follow the reactionary entreaty first enunciated on that Jerusalem hill:
“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
His Grace must feel that, if Jesus had the good fortune to occupy the honourable post of Archbishop of Canterbury today, he’d doubtless phrase differently: “Let men, especially homosexual men, so shine their light before you, that you may see their good works, and glorify everything they do in or out of wedlock.”
Yet it’s not the secular world that’s supposed to teach morality to the Church but the other way around. However, when this was undoubted, the Anglicans were led by great pastors and theologians, not jumped-up oil traders, the ecclesiastical answer to our politicians.
Trying to kowtow to the more objectionable secular fads, the Anglican Church has already forfeited most of its tenuous claim to being an apostolic confession – ordaining women as priests and consecrating them as bishops took care of that.
If His Grace Welby and like-minded hierarchs have their way, lighting the path to perdition, the C of E will soon forfeit its claim to being a Christian church altogether. Perhaps it could then be rolled into the Department of Social Services, or else the Ministry of Diversity.
Meanwhile, I expect reciprocity from the leaders of the homosexual ‘community’. If prelates are apologising for not allowing homosexuals to marry in church, those activists ought to apologise for waging war on family, common decency and the institution of marriage.
I’m not holding my breath though.