Tag Archives: Feminism

Anti-ELCA Benne makes the case FOR the ELCA

This blog has previously posted on three theologians who have attempted to provide intellectual cover for the the ELCA schismatics of WordAlone, Lutheran CORE, and LCMC. (Click here for prior posts regarding Carl Braaten, here for James Nestingen, and here for Robert Benne).

Now, Benne, one of the “neo-cons” who influenced Bush Iraq policy, is at it again in a May 27 article entitled “Lutherans in search of a church”.

A common theme of these three ELCA irritants is that their opposition goes way back to the very beginnings—the merger of three prior Lutheran bodies into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that became a reality in 1988. For each dissident, the focus of their dismay is the polity of the ELCA that mandates a) that voting members shall be 60% laity and only 40% clergy, b) that lay and clergy voting members shall each consist of 50-50 male and female, and c) that 10% of the voting members shall consist of persons of color. For these three white-male-elites, the ELCA allows too much minority influence, too much female influence, and too much lay influence but not enough influence for the good old boy network. A subtle subtext to this theme is that Lutheranism got onto the wrong track when some denominations began to ordain women half a century ago.

Benne’s latest missive suggests this system “insured that the more ‘progressive’ elements of the church would be overrepresented.” As opposed to the regressive-white-male-elites? Who does Benne expect to persuade with this argument?

For those of us who support the ELCA generally and the decisions of CWA09 in particular, we can be thankful for the public statements of the “intellectual” spokesmen for the schismatics. They make our case for us.

For Facebook users, there is a discussion of Benne’s article on the “Lovin’ the Lutheran Church” page. Here’s a sprinkling of the comments:

Kate Wulff says, “Well, it apparently ruined things for ordained straight white men who are mad the church isn’t their personal fiefdom.”

Robert Lewis says, “And speaking as a white male ELCA pastor, I’m quite thankful that my role has been reduced in this denomination. I personally … and we as a denomination … are richly blessed by the women and people of colors and races other than white … as well as the clergy that fit that description.”

Kirsten A.S. Mebust says, “How odd that Benne defines the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church as primarily white (presumably Euro-descended) and male! It’s as if history and orthodoxy began and ended with the first half of the 20th century in the Upper Midwest of the United States! And even then, it excludes the women who established many of the mission churches, including the one I belong to. The church of his fantasy never existed.”

Shelley Barnard says, “Is he really saying that only white males can provide adequate theological guidance? That’s just… bizarre…”

Jim McGowan says, “If CORE and NACL are the ‘last, great efforts to live out the promise of Lutheranism as a church on this continent’ then we are really in trouble.”

And on and on.

Blog posts I didn’t write

As a blogger, I spend more time reading others posts than writing my own. This page contains links to recent posts from the blogs I follow.

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Crumbling Roman Catholic patriarchy

The patriarchy of Roman Catholicism, even the papacy itself, is under siege.

The sex abuse revelations that shook the foundations of American Catholicism in the last decade have reached Europe, first in Ireland, then Germany (implicating the brother of the pope), and today the headlines in newspapers around the world proclaim complicity of the pope himself in covering up the sordid history of abuse on the part of a Wisconsin priest.

In the US, the Council of Bishops stood against the health care legislation that has become the law of the land even as American nuns championed the cause of reform. A small group of Catholic women are inviting excommunication by challenging male only ordination with their own bishops ordaining females in highly public and visible ceremonies. An influential Cardinal has publicly questioned the institution of a celibate priesthood.

Progressive Catholic voices rise. Progressive Catholic organizations such as Voice of the Faithful and Call to Action dare to challenge orthodoxy.

Against this backdrop comes an open letter from Father John J McNeill, not merely a voice for gay rights in the church, but perhaps the voice. I have previously blogged about the lengthy history of Father’s McNeill’s advocacy and the important role he and his writings have played in LGBT equality issues of the last generation. Now, in his open letter to the pope and the entire patriarchal hierarchy, his prophetic voice once again rings clear as he speaks truth to power. His letter, reprinted below in its entirety (with a hat tip to Open Tabernacle blog), is nothing less than a warning that what is presently at stake is the very moral authority of the papacy.

Open Letter to Pope Benedict XVI

In my three areas of expertise; spirituality, psychotherapy and theology, I am aware of a desperate need for spiritual transformation in the culture, the nation, and the Church. I will do my best to make a contribution to that need from my perspective as an older man with many years of involved experience.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

An Open Letter to Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Levada, Cardinal George and all Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in the World on the Issue of Homosexuality:

My initial open letter of November 2000 was addressed to the American Bishops at their annual conference. In the past ten-plus years, the contents of the letter have taken on greater relevance and force in the light of new scientific discoveries concerning the nature of homosexual orientation and the psychological and spiritual needs of GLBT people, as well as recent statements from the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching authority out of touch with those discoveries.

As a result, I would like to readdress the letter to the following: Pope Benedict XVI; Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF); Cardinal Francis George, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and his fellow American bishops and, finally, to all the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in the world.

Catholic gay and lesbian people demand that, if the Church wants to be seen as their loving mother, mediating to us God’s unconditional love, the Church has no choice except to enter into dialogue with its gay members. In 1974, the delegates of DignityUSA’s first national convention requested in a letter that a dialogue be opened between the American bishops and the members of the Catholic gay and lesbian community. With very few exceptions that letter was ignored.

Now, 38 years later, once again in the name of my Catholic lesbian siters and gay brothers I call for open dialogue. For over 38 years, I have ministered as priest and psychotherapist to lesbians and gays. I helped found Dignity/New York to provide a safe and loving community within the Catholic Church for gay people. For over 33 years, I have given retreats for lesbians and gays at Kirkridge, an ecumenical retreat center. I have written four books on gay spirituality: The Church and the Homosexual, Taking a Chance on God, Freedom, Glorious Freedom and Sex: As God Intended: A Study of Human Sexuality As Play. I also published an autobiography on my own spiritual journey as a gay priest.

As a result of my experience, I have come to the conclusion that what is at stake at this point in time is not only the spiritual and psychological health of many gay and lesbian Catholics and other lesbian and gay Christians. What is at stake is your moral authority to teach on the issue of homosexuality. In the past, when you undertook a listening process to hear what the Holy Spirit was saying through the People of God, you won our respect. We respected you when you made your statements on the economy, on nuclear warfare and, especially, your aborted effort to draw up a letter on the role of women in the Church. You listened carefully to what women had to say, and drew up your statements responding to what you heard from women. These actions gave us gay and lesbians reason to hope that the Holy Spirit would lead you into a spirit of willingness to listen to us gay and lesbian Catholics.
What is at stake now is your own moral authority! Unless we gay and lesbian Catholics receive the message that you take us seriously and are willing to listen carefully to what the Holy Spirit is saying to you through our lives and our experience, your judgments on homosexuality will be ignored, for the most part, and you will lose what authority you have left to deserve to be listened to with respect on this issue.

I have never heard the same level of courage from the American bishops in dealing with the Vatican as that shown by the Major Superiors of Religious Men in response to the egregious document issued by The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, entitled, “Some Considerations Concerning Homosexual Persons” as follows:

“We view (this document) as a hindrance to the Church leaders of the United States in this most difficult and sensitive area of human living. —We are shocked that the statement calls for discrimination against gay men and lesbian women. We find the reasoning for supporting such discrimination to be strained, unconvincing and counterproductive to our statements and actions to support the pastoral needs and personal dignity of such persons. Far from a help to the Bishops and other religious leaders in the United States Catholic Church, the statement complicates our already complex ministry to all people.
“Moreover we find the arguments used to justify discrimination based on stereotypes and falsehoods that are out of touch with modern psychological and sociological understandings of human sexuality. We regret such actions by the CDF and we reaffirm our support for the human rights of all our brothers and sisters.”

As a gay Catholic theologian and psychotherapist, I am fully aware of the enormous destruction recent Vatican and USCCB documents, and news items, as well as actions taken by the USCCB and several state Catholic Conferences in the U.S. leading up to the November 2008 elections, have caused in the psychic life of young Catholic gays, and of the violence they will provoke against all gay people. This is compounded further by the initial Vatican reaction and opposition to the United Nations proposal sponsored by France and backed by 27 European Union nations which seeks to end the practice of criminalizing and punishing people for their sexual orientation—their very human nature and spiritual being. I find myself in a dilemma; what kind of faith and trust can I place in a teaching authority that I see clearly acts in an unloving, hateful and destructive way toward my gay family and is more interested in defending its institutional interest than it is in truth and justice? In the name of the thousands of gay and lesbian Catholics and other Christians to whom it has been my God-given privilege to minister, I make this statement:

At this point, the ignorance and distortion of homosexuality, and the use of stereotypes and falsehoods in official Church documents, forces us who are gay Catholics to issue the institutional Church a serious warning. Your ignorance of homosexuality can no longer be excused as inculpable; it has become of necessity a deliberate and malicious ignorance. In the name of Catholic gays and lesbians everywhere, we cry out “Enough!”

Enough! Enough of your distortions of Scripture. You continue to claim that a loving homosexual act in a committed relationship is condemned in Scripture, when competent scholars are nearly unanimous in acknowledging that nowhere in Scripture is the problem of sexual acts between two gay men or lesbian women who love each other, ever dealt with, never mind condemned. You must listen to biblical scholars to find out what Scripture truly has to say about homosexual relationships.

Enough! Enough of your efforts to reduce all homosexual acts to expressions of lust, and your refusal to see them as possible expressions of a deep and genuine human love. The second group you must listen to are competent professional psychiatrists and psychotherapists from whom you can learn about the healthy and positive nature of mature gay and lesbian relationships. They will assure you that homosexual orientation is both not chosen and unchangeable and that any ministry promising to change that orientation is a fraud.

Enough! Enough of your efforts through groups like Courage and other ex-gay ministries to lead young gays to internalize self-hatred with the result that they are able to relate to God only as a God of fear, shame and guilt and lose all hope in a God of mercy and love. What is bad psychology has to be bad theology!

Enough! Enough again, of your efforts to foster hatred, violence, discrimination and rejection of us in the human community, as well as disenfranchising our human and civil rights. We gay and lesbian Catholics pray daily that the Holy Spirit will lead you into a spirit of repentance. You must publicly accept your share of the blame for gay murders and bashing and so many suicides of young gays and ask forgiveness from God and from the gay community.

Enough, also, of driving us from the home of our mother, the Church, and attempting to deny us the fullness of human intimacy and sexual love. You frequently base that denial by an appeal to the dead letter of the “natural law.” Another group to whom you must listen are the moral theologians who, as a majority, argue that natural law is no longer an adequate basis for dealing with sexual questions. They must be dealt with within the context of interpersonal human relationships.

Above all else, you must enter into dialogue with the gay and lesbian members of the Catholic community. We are the ones living out the human experience of a gay orientation, so we alone can discern directly in our experience what God’s spirit is saying to us. And for the first time in history, you have gay and lesbian Catholic communities of worship and prayer who are seeking individually and collectively to hear what the Spirit is saying to them in their gay experience—what experiences lead to the peace and joy of oneness with the Spirit of God and what experiences lead away from that peace and joy! God gave you the commission of discerning the truth. But there is no mandate from Jesus Christ to “create” the truth. We pray daily that the Holy Spirit will lead you to search humbly for the truth concerning homosexuality through dialogue with your lesbian sisters and gay brothers.

The only consolation I can offer gay and lesbian Catholics in the meantime is the profound hope that the very absurdity and hateful spirit of recent Vatican and USCCB documents, news items and political actions will lead gay Catholics to refuse them and recognize the contradiction of their message, and that of Jesus, who never once spoke a negative word concerning homosexuals.

I work, hope and pray that lesbian and gay Catholics and other gay Christians will exercise their legitimate freedom of conscience, discerning what God is saying to them directly through their gay experience. I hope, too, that they will be able to de-fang the poisons of pathologically homophobic religion, accepting the good news that God loves them and accepts them as gays and lesbians and refusing to be caught in the vortex of self-hatred vis-à-vis a God of fear.

I believe that we are at the moment of a special “kairos” in this matter. The Holy Spirit is “doing something new.” I was the guest at a gay ecumenical community that established homes for adult retarded people in the city of Basel in Switzerland. The extraordinary spirit of love and compassion that permeated that community was a foretaste of what lies in the future. I believe there is a vast reservoir of human and divine love that has remained until now untapped because of prejudice and homophobia. The Spirit is calling on you to help release that vast potential of human and divine love through your actions.

The worldwide prayerful vigils in December 2008 were to raise our concerned voices over the stance taken by the Vatican to perpetuate the criminalization, incarceration and death sentences towards people of a homosexual orientation. It is not only counter – productive, it violates your own teaching that all persons are due dignity and respect and that homosexual persons should not suffer violence, injustice and discrimination. Furthermore, that they should be welcomed as full and equal members of the Church and society. We pray and hope that the same Holy Spirit who has graciously liberated us who are gay to self-respect and self-love will liberate in you, our Catholic leaders, a profound love for your gay brothers and lesbian sisters and melt away all prejudice and judgmentalism in your hearts.

May you make us welcome as full members in your family in Christ.

May God bless your efforts!

Sincerely in Christ
John J. McNeill

Comments from the Editor of Dignity’s Quarterly News Journal:
The open letter to the USCCB of November 2000 is currently popping up on several Internet user groups and blogsites, and appears in the Appendix in John’s latest book, Sex as God Intended:A Reflection on Human Sexuality as Play.

Since the release of John’s open letter, there have been numerous documents and communications promulgated by the Pope, Vatican offices and USCCB on matters related to homosexuality. Even more so during 2008. Except for minor nuances, they contain the same repetitive rhetoric. Repetition of falsehoods, erroneous interpretations and bad logic doesn’t make for “the truth” and mitigates our trust and respect of “the teaching authority.”

I was in communication with John from the last week of December 2008 through early January 2009 . I learned he had but one response from a bishop of the United States in response to his initial open letter. John has issued this update and said that while announced as an open letter to the Pope, Cardinals Levada and George and the bishops of the world, it was also directed to ordinary gay Catholics for their discernment and investigation of personal and collective lived experience.
John suggests that the more out of touch the hierarchy of the Catholic Church get, “…the more we learn in a painful way to let go and grow up spiritually”. He calls it “…the blessing of fallibility. We are witnessing the birth pangs of the Church of the Holy Spirit.”

Good news from St Cloud

If one only knows about the ELCA from news media, the impression is probably that dissent over CWA09 bubbles up here, there, and everywhere. While that is true in some congregations, the thriving ministries in most do not receive press attention. But, a positive news article from my old stomping grounds of St Cloud, Minnesota, caught my attention this morning, and I want to offer a brief shout out to Atonement Lutheran Church, a congregation of around 1,650 members. I know Atonement well with many friends there, including a couple of pastors from the past, and I have fond memories of serving on numerous Cursillo teams in their facilities.

The article in the St Cloud Times reports that Atonement has called Pastor Yolanda Lehman, an African American woman and former pastor of the now defunct Resurrection African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church of St Cloud. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Pastor Lehman teaches a diversity course at St Cloud State University, and she has been a popular preacher filling pulpits around the country since 2006 (when the Methodist-Episcopal congregation closed).

Lehman believes that she will be the first black woman to be installed as a pastor in the Southwest Minnesota Synod.

“I am particularly drawn to this congregation because of their commitment to be the hands of Jesus in the world, something I’ve given my whole life to,” she said. “Here, social justice ministries and the care for the poor, oppressed and marginalized for people of color are huge.”

“I am a gregarious person, I would say. I believe in ‘full body worship,’ so you will see me clapping my hands and, you know, moving my feet,” Lehman said about herself as a pastor.

Pastor Lehman will be installed as associate pastor during all weekend services on the 20th & 21st of March. As a friend of Atonement, I extend my best wishes to Pastor Lehman; I am sure her ministry will be a blessing to the entire faith community of St Cloud.

World wide progress toward marriage equality & Father John McNeill becomes a blogger

Two items come to me today from my progressive Catholic friends at Open Tabernacle. The first is Terence Weldon’s post about the progress toward marriage equality in Europe and South America. His post offers some great color-coded maps that show various shades of equality from “full marriage” to “prohibited”.

[A]cross what used to be known as “Western” Europe, only Italy and Greece still have no provision. Even in the former Soviet bloc, there have been advances. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia all recognize Civil Unions, Croatia recognizes unregistered “cohabitation”, and Estonia, the matter is receiving political “consideration”. Meanwhile, although the map does not yet show it, Cyprus too may soon introduce full same sex marriage.

The second is the news that Father John J McNeill has become a blogger who will cross post on the Open Tabernacle. Father McNeill is a legendary pioneer in promoting a progressive religious and biblical understanding of LGBT issues. His classic book, The Church and the Homosexual, first published in 1976, has been reprinted numerous times and remains the standard work of scholarship in the field. I purchased a copy of the fourth edition over fifteen years ago, and it helped inform my own understanding. From a reviewer’s comment printed on the back cover:

A vintage work in the evolving history of the relationship between gay people and institutional Christianity. McNeill’s book remains central to the story.

Now eighty-four years of age, Father McNeill continues to be a prophetic voice for our age, speaking for progressive Catholics and all Christians. His blog, Spiritual Transformation, is brand new, and his first couple of posts are calls for justice for women in the church. Here is a sampling:

Over the past fifty years of ministry in both my study and experience I have become more and more convinced that the deepest root of homophobia both in our culture and in our church is feminapbobia, the fear and suppression of the feminine. Consequently, the most important contribution that can be made to gay liberation is for the gay community to commit itself to women’s liberation.

And another:

If it true that the future of the human race depends on the integration of the feminine on an equal basis with the masculine, it is equally true that the future of the Catholic Church will depend on its willingness to integrate women into its power structure. Tragically, however, the present leadership is fighting tooth and nail to prevent that integration.

I urge my readers to check out his blog and become a follower or RSS subscriber or whatever means you use to follow blogs. You will be rewarded with the rich fruits of a ripened mind.

Gay and female clergy civil disobedience

Dr Martin Luther King Jr. championed civil disobedience as a pushback or resistance to existing law with the goal of ultimately changing the law; of course, that is precisely what happened. Rosa Park’s refusal to sit in the back of the bus and lunch counter sit ins are prototypical examples of civil disobedience. Of course, King had learned from Mohatma Gandhi who used civil disobedience, first in South Africa and later in India, to exact reforms and ultimately Indian independence from colonialist England.

In the Episcopal Church, the election of V. Eugene Robinson as New Hampshire bishop in 2003 was also a form of civil disobedience. Despite denominational rules to the contrary, Robinson was elected as bishop as an openly gay man in a committed relationship. Six years later, the Episcopalians revised their rules to include “all the baptized in all the sacraments”. The fait accompli of Rev Robinson forced the Episcopalians to confront the issue of gay clergy and to ultimately change church policy de jure to accord with the de facto status of Bishop Robinson.

The extraordinary ordinations of gay clergy in the ELCA in the early ‘90’s, accelerating in the new millennium, similarly helped to push the issue of gay clergy to the forefront of the ELCA consciousness, culminating in the momentous actions of the ELCA churchwide assembly of 2009 (CWA09) in which ministry policies were formally changed to allow persons in same gender, livelong, monogamous relationships to become rostered clergy. Those who pushed back, who exerted pressure through civil disobedience, are now being welcomed back into the ELCA (see prior posts here and here).

The most recent example is Pastor Anita Hill of St Paul Reformation church. After I sent Pastor Hill a congratulatory email, she replied, “I’ll be glad when the process is complete for all of us in ELM [Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries]”, and her email contained a quotation from Alice Walker: “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

The Presbyterian Church (USA) is now witnessing the same process of civil disobedience. The John Knox Presbytery covers SW Wisconsin, NE Iowa, and SE Minnesota. As an ELCA person, I think of a Presbytery as being similar to an ELCA regional synod (or diocese in the Roman Catholic and Episcopal traditions). A lengthy article published Feb 22 by the Presbyterian News Service provided background and context to the news that the John Knox Presbytery had voted to reinstate Scott Anderson, a gay man in a twenty year committed relationship, to the rolls of Presbyterian ordained clergy despite ministry policies to the contrary.

The ordination standards of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) [require] that those being ordained practice “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness.”

The Anderson case is based on an apparent loophole in the polity of the PCUSA based on a “scruple” which is an “objection of conscience”. That is, Anderson claimed an objection of conscience to the fidelity-and-chastity rule, and his Presbytery, by a vote of 81-25 agreed. But, that is certainly not the end of the story as opponents will likely appeal this decision to the judiciary of the PCUSA, which must decide whether the policy of “scruple” may be used to circumvent the fidelity-and-chastity ordination rule. If the PCUSA judicial system upholds the ordination of Anderson, it will have established a precedent, a fait accompli, that the PCUSA General Assembly must confront.

The PCUSA is scheduled to convene its 219th annual General Assembly on July 3 in Minneapolis (perhaps ironically, in the same venue as the ELCA assembly which voted to allow gay clergy last year). Certainly, ministry policies will be front and center of the assembly business. If the PCUSA judiciary affirms the Anderson ordination based on the policy of “scruple”, it would appear that the burden of persuasion will have shifted from gay clergy advocates to their opponents; that is, it will be the burden of the opponents of gay clergy to persuade the assembly to change the policy and not vice versa.

In a similar context, there is a “Womanpriest” civil disobedience effort underway within the Catholic Church in the US (see prior posting). The official Roman Catholic policy prohibiting female ordination is set in stone, and there are no exceptions based on “scruple”. Yet, a group of women, and their male supporters, are proceeding to ordain females nevertheless, at the risk of excommunication.

Womanpriest Bishop Andrea Johnson spoke the following as quoted by a Nashville blogger in advance of Johnson’s appearance at Vanderbilt:

“We feel that canon law, which does not represent the people at all — only a few guys in Rome — is unjust,” Johnson [said]. “We’re breaking canon 1024. Like Rosa Parks, we’re saying, ‘No, we are not going to sit on the back of the bus.’ “

Roman Catholic female ordination

Call to Action is the largest group of progressive Catholics with roots in the liberalizing reforms of Vatican II, originally sanctioned by the American Council of Bishops, but which became an outsider organization as conservative retrenchment set in during the papacy of John Paul II.

Pope John Paul II repeatedly dashed hopes for any internal liberalizing during his lifetime, and he prepared for the future by appointing as bishops only men who upheld his views on contraception and the ordination of women. Meanwhile, there were crackdowns on theologians like [Hans] Kung and an insistence from Rome that diversity of opinion was not to be tolerated.

The organization is stronger than ever and continues to a thorn in the flesh of the patriarchal and hierarchal Vatican:

We appeal to the institutional church to reform and renew its structures. We also appeal to the people of God to witness to the Spirit who lives within us and to seek ways to serve the vision of God in human society.

We call upon church officials to incorporate women at all levels of ministry and decision-making.

We call upon the church to discard the medieval discipline of mandatory priestly celibacy and to open the priesthood to women and married men…so that the Eucharist may continue to be the center of the spiritual life of all Catholics.

We call for extensive consultation with the Catholic people in developing church teaching on human sexuality.

We claim our responsibility as committed laity, religious and clergy to participate in the selection of our local bishops, a time-honored tradition in the church.

We call for open dialogue, academic freedom, and due process.

We call upon the church to become a model of financial openness on all levels, including the Vatican.

We call for a fundamental change so that young people will see and hear God living in and through the church as a participatory community of believers who practice what they preach.

Another group of progressive Catholics has moved beyond advocacy to open defiance of the Vatican by ordaining women despite excommunication. Called Roman Catholic Womenpriests, the organization now has five female bishops who are actively ordaining women to the priesthood around the US.

The Sarasota Florida Herald Tribune offered a lengthy article on Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan and her ordination of two women as priests and one as a deacon over the weekend.

A former nun who the Vatican says has been excommunicated will ordain two women priests and one deacon in Sarasota today, part of a growing and controversial movement claiming to be an offshoot of the Catholic church.

The ordinations will be the first in Florida by the group known as Roman Catholic Womenpriests, which preaches equality for women by allowing them into the priesthood and plays down allegiance to the pope.

The official Catholic church calls the movement and the ordinations illegitimate, and the local diocese sent letters to parishes saying any Catholics who support the ordination of women by attending today’s ceremony will be automatically excommunicated — a banishment from participating in church sacraments such as baptism and communion until forgiveness is given by a priest.

“Good!” said Bridget Mary Meehan, the former nun who is performing today’s ordinations and is one of five bishops in the national movement. “They’re upping the ante. People will have to be courageous to support us and that is what this is about. Like our sister Rosa Parks, we refuse to sit on the back of the bus any longer.”

A similar story comes from the Sacramento Bee newspaper in California.

To parishioners in her small Sacramento congregation, Elizabeth English is their Catholic priest: She presides over their Sunday Mass, leads them during Communion and baptizes their babies.

To the Roman Catholic Church, English symbolizes a topic that church leaders consider closed: the ordination of women priests.

English left the Roman Catholic Church five years ago to pursue her calling to the priesthood. She is now a priest in the Independent Catholic Church, a group not recognized by the Vatican. She is the only female Catholic priest in the Sacramento region.

“I had to leave the church; there was no place for me,” she said. “I wish there was.”

Another of the five Womenpriest bishops, Andrea M. Johnson, will appear tomorrow at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. Bishop Johnson will speak and participate in a blue ribbon panel discussion about female ordination. This information comes from blogger Wild Hair whose self description is “Roman Catholic Priest, still in reasonably good standing; aka: eminence, the cardinal archbishop of HGN.”

Finally, Bishop Bridget mentioned earlier has her own blog with lots of info and links about the Womenpriest movement. Check it out.

This article is cross posted at The Open Tabernacle.

Be careful what you tweet

Sometimes it is easy to define ourselves by what we are not. Thus, as a twenty year old watching the 1968 presidential election, I realized I was not the Republican I thought I was due to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, which was nothing less than fear-mongering and race-baiting. From the Wikipedia entry regarding the southern strategy, according to a Nixon strategist:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

While Phillips sought to polarize ethnic voting in general, and not just to win the white South, the South was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level, gradually trickling down to statewide offices, the Senate and House, as legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP.

The Willie Horton ad of 1988 and the 2008 birther and “Obama is a Muslim” movements continued this grand legacy of playing on fears born of the dark side of human nature.

Similarly, it’s easy to be a feminist when Erick Erickson of Red State blog (one of the most popular Republican blogs in Washington) tweets the following after the Super Bowl Tebow ad:

To paraphrase an old adage, best to keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re a fool than to tweet and remove all doubt. Kudos to Pam Spaulding for this snapshot.

Church of England General Synod 2010 convenes

Today marks the start of the 2010 General Synod of the Church of England. As a non-Anglican, I may misunderstand the polity of the worldwide Anglican Communion; with that disclaimer, this is what I think I know, but I stand open to correction.

The Church of England, headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, is the mother church for Anglican bodies around the world. While Archbishop Rowan Williams exercises the authority of persuasion and prestige, those Anglican bodies in communion with the Church of England are essentially self-governing. Thus, Archbishop Rowan unsuccessfully lobbied the Episcopal Church of America last year to refrain from allowing LGBT persons to be ordained as bishops.

Unrelated to the General Synod, Archbishop Williams hosted ELCA presiding bishop Mark Hanson and an ELCA delegation on Friday last. Lutherans and Anglicans already have close relationships (in the US, the Episcopal Church and the ELCA have full communion agreements and in Europe, the Anglicans and the Lutherans of the Baltic states have a similar arrangement in the Porvoo Communion), and the meeting stressed strengthening those relationships:

The Rev. Mark S. Hanson met with Dr. Rowan D. Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, in a private hour-long meeting Feb. 4 at Lambeth Palace here. After the meeting Hanson said the two discussed strengthening Anglican-Lutheran relationships, challenges each leader faces within his own communions, the proposed “Anglican Covenant” to deepen internal church relationships, global environmental issues, Christian-Muslim relationships, and mutual concern for conflicts in places such as Sudan and the Middle East.

Hanson told the ELCA News Service that the discussion of strengthening Anglican Communion relationships focused on existing full communion agreements — in Canada, Europe and the United States. “We talked not only about how this time of ‘reception’ can strengthen the ministries and mission we share, but provide new opportunities for us to be engaged in ways we haven’t even imagined,” Hanson said.

The two world church leaders discussed how both communions can focus on “the pressing issues of the world in which God has placed us,” said Hanson. He said the two agreed there is an urgent need for the United Nations and the U.S. and British governments to find a solution to the conflict in Sudan. The two also discussed commitment and concern for Palestinian Christians, and support for the Council for Religious Institutions in the Holy Land, for Lutheran and Anglican churches in the region and for dialogue with religious leaders in Israel.

In an official written statement to the archbishop, Hanson noted a series of priorities that Lutherans and Anglicans share, including care for the environment, working to end poverty and disease, and seeking peace and justice through greater interfaith understanding. He also noted that Lutherans and Anglicans have faced their share of “challenges in our communions.”

This latter statement about “challenges in our communions” is a bit of tongue in cheek understatement. The two clerics share a commonality as leaders of church bodies embroiled in controversy over LGBT issues, especially gay clergy. Yet, each has taken a different public posture. Bishop Hanson has attempted to remain neutral although the opponents of the ELCA’s pro-LGBT resolutions last summer would claim otherwise; to Lutheran CORE and the WordAlone Network, Bishop Hanson was a primary culprit and behind the scenes force that manipulated the church wide assembly actions, but this merely reflects a conspiracy theorist mentality, in my view. Archbishop Williams, on the other hand, has been outspokenly against the Episcopalian’s 2009 pro-LGBT actions.

The 2009 US Episcopal decision to allow gay bishops provides the dramatic undercurrent to the 2010 Church of England General Synod. The issue arises over the effort by conservatives to recognize the American dissident group of Episcopalians, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). The Telegraph UK reports:

Leading conservative clergy have declared their support for a motion at this week’s General Synod which would ally the Church with the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).

This was formed in opposition to the consecration of Gene Robinson, the first openly homosexual bishop, and the actions of liberals in the Episcopal Church of the US, which is the official Anglican body.

However, the House of Bishops has tabled an amendment to the Synod motion which would seek to defuse the issue by postponing a decision until next year.

The Rt Rev Nicholas Reade, Bishop of Blackburn, is opposed to the stance taken by his colleagues. He said: “I am hoping for a sign of early support for ACNA, not a report coming back to Synod by the end of 2011.”

The Rt Rev Wallace Benn, Bishop of Lewes, a fundamentalist on the Church’s evangelical wing, said: “It seems to me that the House of Bishops’ motion is just needlessly undermining, delaying and prevaricating.”

The original motion, put down by Lorna Ashworth, an evangelical from the Chichester diocese, comes after the Episcopal Church elected a homosexual priest, Mary Glasspool, to be a suffragan bishop in the Los Angeles diocese.

Christian Today offers more background and insight into the debate over the tabled resolution.

American Episcopal priest and blogger Scott Gunn has several posts about ACNA, and his latest is a warning for the Anglicans of the home country that countenancing the schismatics from America will only invite internal turmoil.

Like dealing with a child who is throwing a tantrum, you cannot reward bad behavior. Recognizing secessionists in America ensures they’ll be in England sooner rather than later. Making it clear that they will not be recognized by the Anglican Communion because they chose to walk apart will at least slow them down.

America Magazine, the Catholic Weekly, discusses a different issue which is of greater concern to Roman Catholics, and that is the recent papal invitation for disaffected Anglican priests to be accepted into Roman Catholicism.

The Church of England’s Parliament, known as the General Synod, meets this week, beginning today with an announcement on women bishops which is certain to have an impact on the numbers of Anglican traditionalists choosing to take up the Pope’s ordinariate offer.

Synod voted two years ago to move towards consecrating women bishops, but is yet to come up with a formula for doing so which doesn’t at the same time alienate traditionalists who oppose the move.

Does this make it more likely that C of E traditionalists will accept the Pope’s ordinariate offer? Yes and no. For those that have already decided, in principle, to accept the offer and are waiting on the details, it will confirm their decision. But the view among most traditionalists I have spoken to is that an early exodus would weaken their attempts to safeguard the ‘Catholic’ place in the Church of England. Supporters of women bishops be able to say, in effect, “they’re going anyway. Why agree to what they want?” As long as traditionalists remain in the C of E, the threat of their departure is likely to make supporters of women bishops more likely to negotiate.

You may follow the General Synod proceedings on the website of the Church of England.

Is Lutheran CORE sexist?

My long-deceased uncle, raised in the back country of Louisiana in the 30’s and 40’s, laughingly suggested he was twenty years old before he knew the phrase “damn Yankees” was two words. This good ole boy couldn’t say or think “Yankees” without the adjective “damn”; it was a necessary coupling because “damn” defined the essence of “Yankees”.

And, I plead guilty to the same charge when the baseball team from the Bronx, the best team money can buy, is the subject. The damn Yankees bought another world series last fall.

Oftentimes the adjective/noun coupling used by bloggers, commentators, columnists, etc. tell us more about the writer than the subject. This is especially true in political discourse. When we hear someone use the term “ultra liberal”, we know that the speaker really believes that all liberals are “ultra”. This person can’t say liberal without thinking ultra. It works for those of us on the left also. When we say “arch conservative”, we betray our bias that all conservatives are “arch”. The adjective doesn’t modify the noun but expresses the noun’s true meaning in the mind of the speaker.

Do adjective/noun couplings from Lutheran CORE spokesmen reveal a subtle sexism?

Over the weekend at a CORE gathering in Sioux Falls, CORE speaker Ken Sauer criticized the ELCA (of course), and suggested that the ELCA began to go astray over twenty years ago when “radical feminism began pushing their views.” [sic] Does the coupling of the adjective “radical” with the noun “feminism” reveal more than Sauer may have intended? Is Sauer betraying his belief that feminism is inherently radical? Can Sauer say feminism without thinking radical?

Sauer is not alone. Just a week or two ago, the much ballyhooed missive from CORE spokesperson Robert Benne entitled Why There Must Be New Beginnings blamed “hypersensitive feminism” as a significant problem for the ELCA from the beginning. Can Benne say feminism without thinking “hypersensitive”? Or, “militant feminism” as he states in a different article?

The latent sexism of CORE / WordAlone spokesman James Nestingen is revealed, not by couplings of adjectives and nouns, but in his not-so-veiled criticisms of the 50% male-female gender quotas that produce voting members who lack “wisdom, fidelity and zeal” and are “the manageable, those eager to please” while those who are eliminated by the quota system (men?) “are the gifted and challenging”. Benne openly states the obvious, “The losers, of course, are white male pastors”.

I have previously reported that CORE spokesmen promote a turn away from mainstream Protestantism (Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, UCC) which all ordain women, and toward the conservative Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS), which does not. What is it about the LCMS that CORE finds attractive, one wonders. We presume Lutheran CORE doesn’t aspire to the heightened sexism of the Missouri synod (in some LCMS congregations, women may not even vote but are left to prepare coffee and cookies in the church basement while the men folk hold their elections upstairs). After all, CORE boasts a pair of women on their advisory board. And eighteen men. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, the ELCA announces the following:

Ordaining women as pastors to serve Middle Eastern churches may become a reality. Delegates at the Fellowship of the Middle East Evangelical Churches (FMEEC) voted unanimously Jan. 12 to adopt a statement in support of this change.

The statement was drafted on the spot in response to a report by the fellowship’s theology committee, which found no biblical or theological reasons to oppose the ordination of women. The Rev. Munib A. Younan, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL), is president of FMEEC.

The vote occurred at the organization’s Sixth General Assembly. FMEEC is an association of evangelical (Anglican, Lutheran and Reformed) churches of the Middle East.

Sounds like the radical, militant, hypersensitive feminists are at work again. Damn Yankees.