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Church rejects Anglican pressure over gay rights
PARIS |
PARIS (Reuters) - The top Episcopal bishop in the United States, under pressure from the Anglican Communion for allowing homosexual bishops, has said plans to discipline it in the worldwide denomination violated Anglican traditions.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said the proposal by the Communion's spiritual head, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, was "a troubling push toward centralized authority" in a body born in opposition to Vatican control.
Her reaction, issued in a pastoral letter on Wednesday, amounted to a polite rejection of the idea Williams floated last week in his latest bid to avert a schism in the loose group of churches that make up the 80 million-strong Anglican Communion.
Anglicanism has been torn for years by disputes about authority over Church teaching, especially on gay rights. Williams has tried to counter this by defining Anglican positions more clearly and strengthening his central role.
Jefferts Schori said his Pentecost letter suggesting sanctions for churches that disagree -- both those approving gay clergy and same-sex unions as well as conservatives vehemently opposed to them -- smacked of discredited colonial practices.
"We are distressed at the apparent imposition of sanctions on some parts of the Communion," she said in the letter.
The Episcopal Church was not trying to impose its views on other Anglicans, she said, but it believed its reforms were based on genuine divine inspiration.
"The Spirit may be speaking to all of us in ways that do not at present seem to cohere or agree," she said. "In all humility, we recognize that we may be wrong, yet we have proceeded in the belief that the Spirit permeates our decisions."
COLONIAL ATTITUDES?
Orthodox Anglicans, especially in Africa, vehemently reject pro-homosexual reforms as sinful and unbiblical. Several African churches have ordained orthodox U.S. bishops to lead a dissident network of conservative Anglican churches there.
In the Williams plan, these churches would also be excluded from Anglican committees on doctrine and ecumenical cooperation because they appointed bishops to work in other provinces without the permission of local bishops there.
His proposal came only weeks after the Episcopal Church ordained a lesbian bishop, Mary Douglas Glasspool, despite a request not to do so issued by the Communion after its first gay bishop, Gene Robinson, was installed in 2003.
The Williams proposal, which the Communion's member churches will discuss when their primates next meet in January, had already met critical responses from the reformist and orthodox wings of Anglicanism due to be sanctioned.
Jefferts Schori took a page from the Africans' book by accusing Williams of taking a colonial view of the Communion, most of whose member provinces are former British colonies.
"We live in great concern that colonial attitudes continue," she wrote. "In their search for uniformity, our forebears in the faith have repeatedly done much spiritual violence in the name of Christianity."
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One of the objectives of every government in the past has been the continuing increase in population, because there is strength in numbers. The more people you have in your dominions, the larger the army you can raise for defense or invasion.
Accordingly, religious philosophy, which insists on rigidly supporting only those social practices that create more cannon-fodder babies, and also more workers to create further wealth, is a safeguard for government, a defense against invaders at worst, and a creator of wealth by invasion at best.
This practice was part of a feudal government system, where the peasants had no human rights, and such morality was imposed on them by the nobility, who did not have to comply with these rules.
The US embodied the new thinking regarding individual human rights starting in 1776.
The Anglican Church recognized that slavery was a horrible infringement of human rights, even though God-fearing Anglicans had been some of the worst slavers, supported by the Church heirarchy. The Anglicans managed to work through that moral issue.
Today, they are faced with another human rights dilemma. Some in the Church cannot yet see that their feudal attempts to control people’s relationships in the interests of the State are at odds with the fundamental right of personal life choices.
Instead of demonizing human relationships, the Anglican Church should spend it’s time defining what constitutes loving behavior between human beings, and the elements that best help people find peace, harmony, and respect in their relationships.
If the Church is not helping people to a state of grace, whatever their life choices, and a way of reaching contentment and self-fulfillment in their relationship with the vast and unknowable God they claim to revere, then they have become irrelevant in this modern world, and deserve to go the way of the slavers of the past.
I like the term “discredited
judges ALL sin as lack of love (Matthew 22:36-40). Name a sin and you should be able to identify an unloved victim (self or another). What is sinful about a couple in a homosexual love relationships? Neither is victim, neither is unloved. Where is the hurt? Who is the victim being sinned against?
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