Free Republic

LONDON (Reuters) - Church of England clergy would be able to "bless" same-sex relationships under long-awaited proposals unveiled on Thursday as the church adopts a more open - but disputed - approach to homosexuality. Although gay couples would still not be able to legally marry in a church, the proposed change would officially sanction clergy to let gay and lesbian couples mark and celebrate same-sex marriages and civil partnerships in a church service. Critics swiftly condemned the "blessing" proposal as contrary to the church's teaching on sexual conduct. The proposal was among 18 recommendations put forward by a working group...

President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, met with Archbishop Vincent Nichols today in London to discuss the urgent need for progress on the peace process and the importance of the continuing support of the Church in England and Wales for all in the Holy Land. President Abbas said that the presence of Christians in the Holy Land was vital as they are not viewed as a minority but an integral part of the Palestinian community. He thanked the Church in this country for its work in supporting a peaceful solution, for helping projects in Palestine and told of...

Coming soon to an American court room near you. Wealthy gay dad, Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, says he and his civil partner Tony will go to court to force churches to host gay weddings. He told the Essex Chronicle that he will take legal action because “I am still not getting what I want”.A Government Bill legalising gay marriage passed Parliament recently but it included measures to protect churches from being forced to perform same-sex weddings.Mr Drewitt-Barlow said: “The only way forward for us now is to make a challenge in the courts against the church.“It is a shame that we...

Link to Washington Post Article. There goes the British Empire. The Monarchy has fallen.

It was not so long ago, in 2008, that Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, welcomed Islam into the United Kingdom. He now speaks of having to adapt further to the growing Muslim population, now numbering two million, with 85 Islamic courts in the UK, where women are unequal to men and remain unprotected from the violence of their fathers and husbands. At least one cleric, Suhaib Hasan, is advocating stoning and amputation (one more adaptation to national acceptance of One Law for All). Apparently, English law has already evolved and adopted some aspects of Sharia law, yet Williams...

Israel is the center of the world “in so many ways,” the archbishop of Canterbury said Thursday in Jerusalem. He stressed Israel’s legitimacy and right to security, and also spoke, in the context of persecution of Christians by Islamists in the Middle East, about the Christian imperative to “love our enemies.” It was his maiden visit to the region since being appointed to one of the highest positions in the Protestant Church. The Most Reverend Justin Welby, who has a Jewish father, is the leader of the Church of England and of 80 million Anglicans worldwide. He was enthroned in...

The church is training ministers to create “a pagan church where Christianity [is] very much in the centre” to attract spiritual believers. Ministers are being trained to create new forms of Anglicanism suitable for people of alternative beliefs as part of a Church of England drive to retain congregation numbers. Reverend Steve Hollinghurst, a researcher and adviser in new religious movements told the BBC: “I would be looking to formulate an exploration of the Christian faith that would be at home in their culture.” He said it would be “almost to create a pagan church where Christianity was very much...

The Church of England yesterday gave a green light to wedding-style services for couples in civil partnerships despite its official opposition to same-sex marriage.A report from the Church’s doctrine watchdog urged priests to devise “pastoral accommodations” for gay couples” and to be “flexible”. It said the aim was to enable them to enjoy a “closer approximation” to marriage. The senior bishop who drafted the missive to priests insisted that it did not amount to a policy u-turn and that an official ban on formal "blessings" for civil partnerships remained in place. But he said it was clear there was a...

The Queen will tomorrow back an historic pledge to promote gay rights and ‘gender equality’ in one of the most controversial acts of her reign. In a live television broadcast, she will sign a new charter designed to stamp out discrimination against homosexual people and promote the ‘empowerment’ of women – a key part of a new drive to boost human rights and living standards across the Commonwealth. snip The charter, dubbed a ‘21st Century Commonwealth Magna Carta’ declares: ‘We are implacably opposed to all forms of discrimination, whether rooted in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds.’...

There is a story at CNA/EWTN that made me chuckle a little.What for what is wrong with this (including the terminology). London, England, Jan 4, 2013 / 06:05 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Church of England has decided to permit gay male clergy in civil partnerships to become bishops, provided that they promise to be celibate. [First, let's work to get Catholic news services to stop playing into the hands of the homosexualists by using the word "gay". Next, do they mean "celibate" (unmarried) or "continent" (not sexually active)?]“The House (of Bishops) believed it would be unjust to exclude from consideration...

The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, talked about the recent Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Conn., discounting the argument put forward, including by many Christians in the United States, that "it's not guns that kill, it's people." "People use guns. But in a sense guns use people, too. When we have the technology for violence easily to hand, our choices are skewed and we are more vulnerable to being manipulated into violent action," the leader of the world's 80 million-strong Anglican Communion said, delivering BBC Radio 4's "Thought for the Day" on Saturday.

LONDON (Reuters) - The leader of the Church of England on Tuesday said a vote last month that struck down proposals to allow women to become bishops had been "deeply painful", but that Christianity was still relevant in Britain despite falling numbers of believers. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who leads the global 80-million-strong Anglican Communion, said in his Christmas day sermon that the answer to the question of whether Christianity had "had its day" was a "resounding no". The Church of England narrowly voted against allowing women bishops last month - to the dismay of Williams and Prime Minister...

To paraphrase, the arroyo to hell is paved with good intentions, illegally dumped garbage, dead trees and underbrush. Just ask Peter and Françoise Smith. They had the audacity to clear debris out of the arroyo on their property behind their home, off N.M. 14 southwest of Santa Fe. Peter Smith says “people dumped garbage down there, and there was a beetle infestation that took out a lot of the piñon.” He says the estimated 600 dead trees presented a fire hazard and the non-native “salt cedar was getting to the point it was so thick you couldn’t walk through it....

In the wake of the narrow defeat of the women bishops measure in the Church of England's General Synod by six votes in the House of Laity, a torrent of criticism has been unleashed on evangelical and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans who opposed the measure. From the Archbishop of Canterbury, members of Parliament, and down through the ranks, the consciences and reasons of those who voted against the measure have been belittled and even vilified. This vilification is most obvious in the editorial in The Guardian (London) from Friday, Nov. 23 by Canon Giles Fraser. Until recently, Canon Fraser held a senior...

The vote against women bishops at the General Synod by the House of Laity may be puzzling to some; perhaps even more so if you are told (correctly) that a significant number of those who voted against it are themselves in favour of women bishops. Tom Sutcliffe has written a balanced and helpful article for Anglican Ink which explains things well. See: A "liberal" member of Synod explains his "no" vote on women bishops. (H/T The Deacon's Bench) Essentially he and others considered that the proposal was misguided in its approach to those who opposed women bishops, and would over-ride...

Being cruel to Anglicans is about as low as kicking a puppy. The Anglican Church does a lot of good for a lot of people and its presence in British public life forces debates about politics and social policy to be a bit more reflective than they would otherwise be. It is also capable of profound beauty. Village churches are arks of Englishness: neatly stacked Books of Common Prayer, hard wooden pews, a perfume of human breath and burning wax, a Union Jack hung above a shrine to the fallen. I pray that the Church of England is never disestablished,...

We, of all people, ought to know better. "Progress" gave us modern medicine, liberal democracy, the internet. It also gave us the guillotine, the Gulag and the gas chambers. Western intelligentsia assumed in the 1920s that "history" was moving away from the muddle and mess of democracy towards the brave new world of Russian communism. Many in 1930s Germany regarded Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his friends as on the wrong side of history. The strong point of postmodernity is that the big stories have let us down. And the biggest of all was the modernist myth of "progress". What is more,...

(Reuters) - The next archbishop of Canterbury is confident he will consecrate a female bishop, he said on Thursday, two days after the Church of England voted against allowing women to become bishops. Bishops and clergy on Tuesday in the General Synod, the Church legislature, comfortably backed the change but lay members were four votes short of a two-thirds majority. "Its clear that woman are going to be bishops in the Church of England," said Justin Welby, who will take over from Rowan Williams as the spiritual leader of the Anglican wing of world Christianity at the end of the...

The transcript for a debate which took place in the British parliament yesterday makes for sobering reading. The debate took place in the wake of the vote by the General Synod of the Church of England not to pass the measure which would have brought in women bishops. One of the remarks made by Sir Tony Baldry, the Second Church Estates Commissioner is particularly noteworthy. He said: As a consequence of the decision by the General Synod, the Church of England no longer looks like a national Church; it simply looks like a sect, like any other sect. If it...

"When the Church of England narrowly defeated a measure to allow women to be appointed bishops this week after a dozen years of legislative effort, many observers were surprised. After all, the group has ordained women as priests since 1994-what's the big deal with letting female priests become bishops? The answer helps explain why the measure failed. The Church of England is known for the graciousness with which it accommodates minority theological opinions. Since the 1990s, parties that disagreed about female ordination merely had to tolerate each other's presence. Female bishops, on the other hand, would hold significant ecclesial and...