Posted on 12/30/2006 9:37:36 AM PST by sionnsar
My kind readers know I dont have especially high expectations of the Episcopal Church. But this letter from the TEC Diocese of Georgia, to Christ Church Savannah floored me. I dont know what the exact legal definition of such things are, but its extortion pure and simple. Christopher Johnson says more about that.
This letter along with other actions of Episcolib bishops and chancellors also reveals an obsession with money and with stripping departing orthodox priests of all holy orders. That I cant understand. If a priest is leaving for another jurisdiction, why the need to strip him of all orders? Vindictiveness?
As for money, some bishops might as well say, Screw the Holy Listening! Just show me the money!
Now I could vent on the Bishop of Georgia and he would deserve it and more. But Craig Goodrich is on to something deeper:
OK, this clinches it. Neither +Lee nor +Loutit [the Bishop of Georgia] have been aggressive with their orthodox parishes in the past, and for those who know them it seems wildly out of character since they are both apparently by nature fence-sitters who would prefer the whole controversy to just go away.
But now we find them suddenly sending these unGodly (literally) threatening letters in tones so nasty and imperious that they shock even most liberally-leaning Episcopalians (with the exception, of course, of the few who are completely off the deep end). Why?
Do we know of any diocese that has recently been managed with such obliviously tactless, heavy-handed techniques? Where any suggestion of disagreement with the Bishop would cost you your job? Where well-loved and long-serving priests were hounded out of the diocese (and in one case, even resigned his orders)?
Virginia, Georgia welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas!
In other words, the bishop acting as Mafioso was Kate Schoris M.O. as bishop of Nevada. And now that shes the Presiding Bishop, it has already become the M.O. of 815, of the national Episcopal Church.
As incredible as the letter from the Diocese of Georgia is, its not exceptional in the Episcopal Church.
Its policy.
Since I left the ECUSA in 1991, I can only view this as an interested observor. However, as I served as a Vestryman in a church under the dominion of both the Bishop of London and the ECUSA (Wiesbaden, Germany), I still remain faithful to the Anglican Church.
That said, I have no doubt given the actions of the Bishop of Virginia and now the Bishop of Georgia that the new Presiding Bishop has decided to wage war on her parishes. I hope that the congregations have the courage to stand firm and take them on. It seems to me that the case of the Falls Church is strong: they predate both the diocese and the ECUSA, and the laws of Virginia favor the congregation in such matters. If they succeed, it may encourage others.
If they fail, the ECUSA will become a church in name only, merely a social gathering of godless secular humanists, who having embraced homosexuality, will be dominated by its culture with all its trappings.
Verrrrrrrrrry Interrrrrrresting
The New World Order feminazi heretic Katharine Jefferts-Schori intends to turn the Episcopal Church into an NGO that supports the UN Millennium Goals, the One Campaign, and other NWO campaigns and causes. Such an NGO needs money, even though it does not really need all those church buildings, seminaries, and esepecially not those "inconvenient" orthodox Christian laypeople, priests, and bishops.
The solution? LOOT the assets that generations of faithful Christians have built up in ECUSA's church buildings, endowment funds, seminaries, etc!!!! That is why KJS and her minions are so totally ruthless about issues of "property". In my humble opinion, this is nothing short of evil!
Yes, it is a "different gospel" that is being proclaimed, as though there were something new and different about this warmed-over Gnosticism and Docetism.
Quoheloth was right, "there is nothing new under the sun"....when it comes to heresy, that is.
...and yet, many have a difficult time contemplating the active existence of evil and the ways in which it attacks Christianity. As CS Lewis pointed out, old Screwtape would like nothing so much as for you to picture him in a preposterous set of red tights rather than to have a clue as to his nefarious subtlety.
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