Today the Telegraph carries a report Gay bishop must go ‘or the church will split’ in which Jonathan Petre claims that the Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali may be one of the anonymous authors of a document which Archbishop Drexel Gomez of the West Indies submitted to the Lambeth Commission of which he is himself a member. (I am extremely doubtful of this claim.)
The story was reported in the Church of England Newspaper on 17 June under Robinson appointment ‘invalid’.
The document was one of two he submitted, both of which were published on the internet on 15 June. No authors are listed for either document, not even Drexel Gomez himself.
They can be found here:
Called to Witness and Fellowship
The current crisis in the Anglican Communion – what are the ecclesiological issues involved?
Petre writes in part:
Posted by Simon Sarmiento on Monday, 21 June 2004 at 7:25 AM GMT | TrackBackAnglicanism’s first openly gay bishop was invalidly consecrated and must be stripped of his post if the worldwide Church is to avoid schism, a leading conservative demanded yesterday.
In an extraordinary twist in the civil war over homosexuality, the Primate of the West Indies, Archbishop Drexel Gomez, said Bishop Gene Robinson, of New Hampshire, must be replaced or the Church would split in two.
The ultimatum by Archbishop Gomez, a member of the Lambeth Commission set up by the Archbishop of Canterbury to broker peace between the warring factions, will outrage liberals and further polarise positions.
Doesn’t that make all Anglican bishops invalidly consecrated since Thomas Cranmer?
Posted by: Tuck at June 21, 2004 03:15 PMI love it. {sarcasm mode off} Were Gomez, Nazir-Ali, and all the other hyperventilating ‘phobes elected in as transparent a procress as +Gene was?
The fact is, most of the world-wide Anglican hierarchy hates ECUSA democracy, and the vote given to the laity (ala the African bishop at Lambeth who said that the bishops were “like God the Father”). However, of course, except when the beans are being counted among the votes of the bishops in the entire AC (“Then it’s majority rule, you American Episcopal ‘exactly like Bush in Iraq’ imperialists!”).
To paraphrase the anti-war slogan from the 60s “What if they declared a cathedra vacant, and nobody stopped kissing +Gene’s ring?”
Posted by: J. Collins Fisher at June 22, 2004 05:37 AMWhatever happened to Article XXVI? If, as Gomez has admitted, Robinson was properly consecrated, then he is a bishop. Gomez et al. may legitimately want to discipline him, but he is a bishop! Why do Anglicans look for idiotic novelties like alternative episcopal oversight and ignore their own tradition?
Posted by: simon at June 22, 2004 09:20 AMTuck,
It would certainly make all Anglican orders invalid from Elizabeth’s time forward. The English state essentially hijacked the Church in England, uncanonically deprived nearly the entire English hierarchy in the face of opposition from the rest of the Western Church. Moreover, Elizabeth, in the face of unanimous opposition from the rest of the Western Church, directed that these bishops be elected and consecrated to Sees in a manner that was not only uncanonical, but also, for reasons too complicated to explain here, contrary to the Act of Parliament that was enacted for this very purpose. Although Catholics loudly deplored the circumstances in which Elizabeth hijacked the English Church, the Catholic Church NEVER declared Anglican Orders to be invalid for that reason. Instead, the condemnation of Anglican Orders concerned defects in Prayer Book Ordinal itself, not because the consecrations were unlawful, schismatic, tore down the Body of Christ, and opposed by the rest of the Catholic world.
Also, according to the standard Catholic theology, so long as a male is baptized, it is sufficient for a valid intent that a bishop intends to do do what the Church does in administering the sacrament of ordination, unless the minister of ordination manifests a contrary intent. Thus, so long as the minister of the sacrament of orders intends to do what the Church does, a bishop may indeed validly ordain an atheist, even if such an ordination may be sinful or schismatic. By Catholic standards, I would submit that Gomez’s position is at least heterodox, if not outright heretical.
Posted by: Patrick Rothwell at June 25, 2004 05:46 PM