Posted on 01/25/2006 7:54:41 AM PST by NYer
WASHINGTON -- Could Episcopalians soon be celebrating the Feast of St. Thurgood?
The Episcopal Diocese of Washington is to consider a resolution this Friday recommending that the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall be considered a saint.
A press release from the diocese said: "If the resolution passes, and is approved by consecutive meetings of the Church's national convention, Episcopal churches will have the opportunity to celebrate May 17 as Marshall's feast day."
On that date in 1954, Marshall, who was later to become the first black Supreme Court justice, won the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case. He died in 1993.
The diocese said Thurgood Marshall didn't speak publicly about his faith, but belonged to Episcopal Churches in New York and Washington.
At the last Diocesan Choral Festival I participated in (before I finally swam the Tiber), one of the anthems began, "Holy Martin, Blessed Martyr." I couldn't bring myself to sing it . . .
The more heterodox dioceses in ECUSA (like Atlanta, which is led by one of the delegation that crashed the party at Nottingham uninvited to explain why gay is not only not sinful, but Good) have become indistinguishable from UU congregations - just ultra-liberal social action organizations - but with pretty vestments and better music.
Do you want to honor him for his adultry, or his plagarism? Come to think of it, it would fit in fairly well with the modern ECUSA.
While Thurgood Marshall is certainly an important and praiseworthy man for helping to end segregation, I find it preposterous that this qualifies him for sainthood.
Obviously, the proponents of sainthood fo Marshall are trying to strike a blow for liberal judicial activism by endowing a liberal justice with an aura of holiness. Marshall almost always voted the left-liberal line when he was on the Supreme Court. If Marshall is a saint, does this mean that anyone who voted the opposite of how he voted (like William Rehnquist) was acting against the will of God?
It's a PC sideshow. In the Catholic Church, evidence of two miracles is required to qualify for sainthood. The criteria of the Episocpals seems completely subjective. After all, if Marshall is worthy of sainthood based on his personal faith why not Antonin Scalia. Scalia's faith is well known, and the standard used here makes no sense.
Shudder (bad memories being evoked)....and I was having such a good day too....Deus Caritas Est, Conversion of St. Paul, the live broadcast from St. Paul's-outside-the walls, Robbie Burns' birthday.
How does this action figure to make him into a saint?
I don't really understand the Epicopalian method for sainthood, and I am very shocked to find that it differs so dramatically from Catholicism's.
There is little doubt that Thurgood Marshall was a champion of racial equality, but does that really make a person a saint? He did nothing, so far as I am aware, to champion Christianity. Moreover, he voted in favor of abortion in Roe v. Wade and subsequent abortion cases. It just seems to me that the notion of naming him a saint is going WAY TOO FAR. I can think of many other Anglicans (C.S. Lewis, Oswald Chambers) who would seem far more deserving than Marshall. I am very leary of the idea of making sainthood a popularity contest.
Good Lord. MLK is already on their liturgical calendar, and has made his way into some of their liturgical services. At least he was nominally a preacher. This is ridiculous. But nothing is as commonplace as ECUSA doing the ridiculous.
MLK has indeed been sainted by ECUSA, if their calendars and liturgical services are any indication.
Not in our diocese.
True. The ECUSA is an anti-Christian denomination, a congregational blasphemy.
One guy makes an icon and you condemn us along with the Church of Vicki Gene?
That might be jumping to a conclusion on the basis of some flimsy evidence. Then again ...
" That might be jumping to a conclusion on the basis of some flimsy evidence. Then again ..."
Then again.....
You know, C, this really is blasphemy. Where is this clown's abbot?
I don't know. If you can find him, and write him, and tell him, I salute you.
His title wouldn't be "abbot," though.
" His title wouldn't be "abbot," though."
Aren't franciscans monastics? I would assume this fellow is under obedience to someone.
Robert Lentz is a Franciscan friar whose innovative icons are known throughout the world. He is a member of the Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and is currently stationed at All Saints Church in Houston, TX while writing 14 icon alter pieces of recently canonized saints. Besides painting many hours each day, he writes and teaches workshops on art and spirituality throughout the country.
Brother Robert was born in rural Colorado in 1946. His grandparents emigrated from tzarist Russia at the turn of the last century. He studied Byzantine iconography by apprenticing himself to a master painter from the school of Photios Kontoglou in a Greek Orthodox monastery founded from Mount Athos. He belongs to the Byzantine Rite but chooses to work among the poor in the American Southwest.
His icons reflect his experiences among the poor in this country and in the Third World, as well as his Franciscan and Russian roots. They are filled with bright colors and often depict contemporary subjects. While always striving to remain true to the essence of Byzantine iconography, he adapts traditional conventions in order to minister better to the emerging Church of the 21st Century. His icons remain transcendent expressions of the other world, however, which invite us to communicate with God and the saints.
He also has his own website but I could not access it on dial up ( toooooo sllllooooowwwww lllloooaaadddiiiinnngggg)
"The monk is an iconographer and quite a good one,...."
He is not an iconographer; he is a blasphemer. I don't doubt for a minute that he might have taken money from ECUSA for blasphemy. I suspect his monastic master at the Holy Mountain would be very ashamed that he taught this person anything if he knew of this. If I can find out who the master is, I intend to tell him about this the next time I'm at Mount Athos. Icons are not statements of political correctness nor are they written for just any good person.
I just took a look at his website and his work. His "icons" are of such great "saints" as Albert Einstein, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Black Elk; Caesar Chavez, the Mohammaden Jalal Ud-din Rumi. The list goes on and on and on. This man is not only a blasphemer, he is a heretic!
I agree with you. Also how do the icons of such worldly figures as MLK and Chavez turn our thoughts to heaven. Am I wrong in thinking that Icons serve as windows to heaven and should lead us to contemplate the holiness of true Saints?. Do these icons proclaim the Glory of God or the glory of man? There are ways to honor our secular heroes but dressing them in the mantle of Sainthood when they are not Saints is indeed blasphemous.
"Also how do the icons of such worldly figures as MLK and Chavez turn our thoughts to heaven."
These "icons" are not of God but of the Evil One who couldn't be happier than to have a monastic so distort what are among the oldest objects of veneration in Christianity. This is, in a sense, a reverse iconoclasm. Having failed with that heresy 1300+ years ago, he renews it with a twist and delivers it to us from the hands of a monk lionized by the Latin Rite community if a google search is any indicator. And as he apparently continues to paint these disgraces, one can only assume that his superiors in the Latin Church approve of this. If they don't approve, why is he painting in Latin Churches or those of the Byzantine Rite in communion with Rome?
I have run across these paintngs on the internet from time to time and assumed it was some agnostic or Protestant who didn't know any better who produced these. I must say that this discovery is very, very discouraging to me as a partisan of an appropriate reunion of the Roman Church with Holy Orthodoxy.
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