He was a nice bishop, not a take charge type, who honestly wanted to go along to get along. And I don't think he appreciated the real motives of the folks in charge of the national church.
Events overtook and overwhelmed him, and I really think that when the ground was cut from under him he had no idea what to do. To the extent that he allowed himself to be ruled by 815, his bad. But I've been inside a bad organization before (in fact a branch of the SAME bad organization), and the leaders can be very plausible and very persuasive, and before you know it you're in too deep to get out. Happened to a lot of basically nice people I knew.
We got out -- our emotional and financial ties were not as deep as some folks', and we didn't have anybody buried in the graveyard.
Just to clarify, you are talking about the Bishop, not a middle manager in the SS? Because with a few minor modifications, the description would fit either.
I thought, "Good! A Bishop who believes in matrimony a little." So maybe 4 years later a couple comes to me to get hitched and at least one of t hem had two or three priors. So I go to El Obispo and somewhere in the interim all that good stuff had been thrown out the window!
And when I went to him with MY particular beef about 815 allowing a confessor to be forced (by threats of huge contempt fines) to violate "the seal", he had a lot of weasel reasons why it wasn't the calamity I thought it was.
And he gave some totally BS reason for signing off on VIcki Gene's condesecration, and much later he said that, well, actually he thought that homosexuality was okay.
So, was he a weasel or a poltroon?
I think the BS about Vicki Gene was weaselly. I don't know about the retret on matrimony. But what I do know is that an Episcopal bishop has such incredibly circumscribed power that he pretty much has to govern by dishonesty, manipulation, and popularity contest. And the TIDE of liberlism in TEC was something awesome to behold. Evidently at some clergy conference or maybe at Diocesan Council they were debating abortion, and some priestette gets up and pulls the whole, "This is so painful for me to hear this debated. After all, I've HAD an abortion and this is all personal for moi."
In other words: I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman, and you'd better not talk or even think about stuff that makes me uncomfortable, despite the fact that it is the church's JOB to provide moral consideration and guidance.
And in what was one of the last councils I attended, TEC's pretended stand against divorce was assaulted by someone who said that in the bad old days, life expectancy was short and an less than delightful marriage was not likely to last long because somebody would probably get sick and die. But in these days, advances in modern medicine have reduced deaths in childbirth and generally given us far longer lives. SO it is just too much to expect people t o stay married for these new-fangled long lives.
It's hard to type about this because it so easily lends itself to satire. Apparently the point is that the curse of modern medicine has so blighted our lives that we moderns simply cannot be expected to keep our marital vows, burdened as we are with interminable lives and the unwelcome recovery of our childrens' mother from the perils of parturition or her husbands ungenerous refusal to succumb to pneumonia or the grippe. Modern medicine confronts us with trials our Lord simply cannot have imagined.
I am so glad I got outta there. Comparative poverty and job insecurity is balm and delight compared to enduring such councils and counsels.