Doing Consents Right Redux

The odd story of how consents are actually obtained for consecrations in The Episcopal Church that I wrote about yesterday saw further developments today. The Living Church posted a story by reporter Steve Waring, “Canonically Defective Testimonial Alleged in Virginia Coadjutor Request,” on its Web site today.

Based on remarks by the Rev. Jan Nunley, it appeared that “canonically defective” wording of consent testimonials has been in regular use for quite some time. Clearly, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori could not be responsible for this situation, as she has been in office less than a year. According to Waring, the canon to the Presiding Bishop, the Rev. Canon Carl Gerdau, sees no problem in using the “short form” recently used by the Diocese of Virginia for consents, rather than the one prescribed in Canon III.11.4(b). Presumably, Canon Gerdau has been regularly and intimately involved with the consent process. He is about to retire, but he served in his current position under former Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold since 1998.

In my previous post, I quoted only as much of Canon III.11.4(b) as was quoted in the San Joaquin standing committee’s letter. Here is Canon III.11.4(b) in its entirety:

Evidence of the consent of each Standing Committee shall be a testimonial in the following words, signed by a majority of all the members of the Committee:

We, being a majority of all the members of the Standing Committee of ______________, and having been duly convened at ______________, fully sensible how important it is that the Sacred Order and Office of a Bishop should not be unworthily conferred, and firmly persuaded that it is our duty to bear testimony on this solemn occasion without partiality, do, in the presence of Almighty God, testify that we know of no impediment on account of which the Reverend A.B. ought not to be ordained to that Holy Order. In witness whereof, we have hereunto set our hands this _____ day of _________in the year of our Lord _________.
(Signed) _______________

Contrast this with the version sent out by the Diocese of Virginia to standing committees, as reported by the Rev. Dan Martins:

Having been duly elected on January 26, 2007, at the Annual Council of the Diocese of Virginia.

We, being a majority of all the ____ members of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of ____, having been duly convened at ____, give our consent to the ordination and consecration of the Very Rev. Shannon S. Johnston as Bishop Coadjutor for the Diocese of Virginia.

In witness whereof, we have here unto set our hands this ___ day of ___, 2007.

(I rendered the above in boldface for easy comparison.) Although this “short form” lacks an explicit signature line, it, like the canonical version, is intended to be followed by signatures of a majority of standing committee members.

A clarification should be made at this point. The electing diocese sends requests for consent to the standing committees of all the dioceses of the church. Apparently, these requests invariably contain wording for what the canons call a “testimonial,” which the standing committees use to communicate their consent to the proposed consecration. (The canons are vague about what a standing is supposed to do if it does not consent. Some send a letter to the electing diocese, but others simply do not reply.) If an electing diocese sends a “defective” version of the testimonial, standing committees are, of course, free to use the canonical form. Their members can read the canons as well as anyone else.

Some observations:

1. The first “sentence” of the “short form” makes no sense. There is no verb.
2. The “short form,” unlike the canonical form, requires the recording of the number of members on the standing committee. Although this information is, in a sense, inessential, it does help prevent the misunderstanding that any majority vote of a standing committee with a quorum present is sufficient to render consent. It would not be surprising to learn that the origin of the “short form” is somehow related to this feature.
   
3. The “short form” omits boilerplate presumably intended to impress on standing committee members that they should take their role seriously: “fully sensible how important it is that the Sacred Order and Office of a Bishop should not be unworthily conferred, and firmly persuaded that it is our duty to bear testimony on this solemn occasion without partiality, do, in the presence of Almighty God… .” This isn’t exactly 21st-century language, but the meaning is clear and, as they say, it can’t hurt. The words “without partiality” emphasize that the decision should be an objective one, which, in these times, may need to be said.
   
4. The real difference, of course, is that the canonical form has standing committee members declaring that they “know of no impediment” to the proposed consecration, whereas, in the “short form,” members merely “consent” to the consecration, irrespective of what they may know or not know.

Are these differences significant? I think so. To begin with, there can be a real difference between assenting to a consecration and testifying that you know of no reason why it should not take place. In the case of South Carolina’s quest to consecrate the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence, one has to doubt that any standing committee member did not know of impediments to his consecration. Clearly, however, some people voted for him anyway. The “short form” would have made that even easier to do.

Steve Waring’s story, however, makes it clear that South Carolina, contrary to Nunley’s assertion, did use the proper form, although it was only at the urging of the Rt. Rev. F. Clayton Matthews, Bishop for the Office of Pastoral Development, that its standing committee did so. (Nunley has updated her post and corrected her original statement, which seems to have been based on a David Beers letter. It is unclear as to where Beers got his information. Perhaps it was from Canon Gerdau.)

Following the constitution and canons also matters because we have agreed that we will do so, and we seek (I presume) to be people of integrity. Moreover, if everyone retains a right to follow the rules only when, to him or her, it seems important, then no one can ever call anyone else to account; in essence, there will be no rules.

What is so hard to understand in this case is why anyone would feel the need to substitute a “short form” for the canonical testimonial. In actual practice, one almost never expects an episcopal election to be invalidated by a failure to achieve the necessary consents, so that subtle differences in wording are unlikely to change the outcome of the consent process. Have dioceses been using the “short form” because it involves typing fewer keystrokes?

The difference in attitude between Gerdau and Matthews, both of whom work directly under the Presiding Bishop is striking. Whereas Waring reports that Matthews “cautioned the diocese about the language in its consent request,” Gerdau is quoted as saying, of the “short form,” that it has been “used for a long time and no one has ever objected to it before.” Gerdau’s statement sounds like something a policeman accused of having conducted an illegal search might say: “No one objected to the lack of a search warrant before.”

Clearly, the Presiding Bishop needs to communicate to everyone working at or for the Episcopal Church Center that adherence to the constitution and canons of The Episcopal Church is not optional, just as it is not optional for bishops, clergy, and laypeople outside of New York City. That the consent process is cumbersome and opaque to most of the people in the church is unfortunate. A more open process would, among other things, expose quickly deviations from canonical procedures. Had Virginia posted its requests for consents on its Web site, for example, I doubt that 24 hours would have passed before bloggers noted its inconsistency with Canon III.11.4(b). The church should develop carefully written procedures to guide standing committees through requesting consents, and those procedures should be posted on the Web, along with—as I suggested in my previous post—a PDF version of a proper consent testimonial. A church with millions of members and a multi-million-dollar budget should not act like a bunch of kids who decided to put on a musical in someone’s back yard.

Doing Consents Right

Not every church has the formal legal structure of The Episcopal Church. Its ultimate governing authority, a triennial gathering of bishops, priests, deacons, and laypeople, is called the General Convention. The church overall has a constitution and canons (church laws), and its constituent dioceses are similarly governed by conventions, constitutions, and canons. The nominal leader of the church is the Presiding Bishop, who might properly be described as an extremely weak executive. Dioceses, on the other hand, are led by bishops, who are quite powerful.

If I were inventing The Episcopal Church today, I would change some of the details of its organization, but I certainly would preserve its democratic ethos and, particularly, its rule by law, which acts as a bulwark against the goofiness and cultism to which Christianity seems especially susceptible.

Unfortunately, legal systems, whether secular or ecclesiastical, necessarily create tensions and require constant attention. How literally should laws be interpreted? What should be done when the spirit of the law and the letter of the law appear to be in conflict? What is the proper threshold for invoking disciplinary action? The United States has always had to deal with such issues, and it even has an institution, the Supreme Court, that might be viewed as a body whose major concern is dealing with them. By comparison, The Episcopal Church has been less contentious, legally speaking, and it has fewer structures and precedents to guide it when the inevitably messy issues of law present themselves.

When the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence failed to achieve sufficient consents from standing committees to be consecrated the next bishop of South Carolina, two canonical issues made the outcome of the consent process controversial. First, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori allowed, apparently in clear violation of the canons, 123 days, rather than 120 days, for consents to be received. By no one’s reckoning were sufficient consents received within 120 days. Three days later, however, a sufficient numbers of reputed testimonies that standing committees had consented to the consecration had been received. The Presiding Bishop declared that Lawrence’s bid to become a bishop had failed, however, because some of the consents were improperly executed, lacking, for example, signatures of standing committee members. (See the ENS story here.)

The Rev. Dan Martins, a Stockton, California, priest from the same diocese as Mark Lawrence (San Joaquin) and a former member of his diocese’s standing committee has raised a troubling issue on his blog. It seems that, when the Diocese of Virginia requested consents for the Very Rev. Shannon S. Johnston to be consecrated bishop coadjutor, the wording of the testimonials requested by the Diocese of Virginia differed from that prescribed by canon. Martins reports that the San Joaquin standing committee has raised this issue with the Presiding Bishop and her chancellor in three separate letters and has received no answer. The letter suggests that the Presiding Bishop is applying the canons of the church selectively, and, perhaps, prejudicially. In what follows, I will assume that what the standing committee asserts was done by Virginia is true; its members are in a position to know, whereas I am not, and I believe that Martins is an honorable priest.

It is, I think, incumbent upon the Presiding Bishop to provide an explanation for her decisions. She should do so promptly. I would expect her to say that she extended the consent period for the Lawrence consents out of Christian charity, and that the defective consents raised questions as to whether certain standing committees had, in fact, validly consented as required by canon. This explanation necessarily raises the question as to why, having already bent the canons to allow more standing committees time to respond, she did not take the extra time to query the standing committees that submitted defective testimonies and give them the opportunity to correct any “technical” errors they may have made.

As to the Virginia consents, I would expect Jefferts Schori to explain that we all know what consents are all about, and sufficient testimonials with valid signatures were received to allow Johnston’s consecration. Perhaps, with the help of David Booth Beers, her chancellor, she will offer a better explanation. She needs one. The wording required by canon includes the following:

[We,] fully sensible how important it is that the Sacred Order and Office of a Bishop should not be unworthily conferred, and firmly persuaded that it is our duty to bear testimony on this solemn occasion without partiality, do, in the presence of Almighty God, testify that we know of no impediment on account of which the Reverend A.B. ought not to be ordained to that Holy Order. In witness whereof, we have hereunto set our hands… .

The wording of the Virginia declaration was much shorter and to the point:

[We] give our consent to the ordination and consecration of the Very Rev. Shannon S. Johnston as Bishop Coadjutor for the Diocese of Virginia.

What should we make of this difference? One can certainly argue that the flowery language about standing committee members being persuaded as to what their duty is is really just so much fluff. It is difficult to overlook the difference of substance here, however. Whereas standing committee members are supposed to certify that they “know of no impediment on account of which [the Very Rev. Shannon S. Johnson] ought not to be ordained” a bishop, Virginia only asked for “consent to the ordination and consecration” of Johnston. In principle, one could know of an “impediment” to Johnson’s consecration that would impel a vote against consecration if one had to sign a document containing the wording in the canons. Virginia’s wording would allow a signature, however, in spite of such an impediment.

I have the greatest respect and affection for Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, but I do think that she has gotten herself into a muddle of her own making. I do not suspect that she acted out of any but the best of motives, but, like many new executives, I believe that she stumbled on her way up the learning curve. Here is what she should do:

1. Admit that allowing 123 days for consents to be received was a mistake, for which she begs forgiveness. The canons are clear that the proper number is 120, and the wording makes it clear that the General Convention intended the starting date to be unambiguous. The time period is arbitrary, but its length and beginning point is intended to be fixed. The Presiding Bishop should declare that, in the future, only 120 days will be allowed and, within 7 days of the start of the consent period, the day on which the clock started with be announced publicly, so that everyone knows when the deadline is.
2. Explain again that sufficient valid consents for Lawrence’s consecration were not received within 120 days. Whether or not sufficient consents were received in 123 days is moot. (This declaration will likely be criticized, and a public relations expert might question my advice. I cannot see a viable alternative, however.)
3. Admit that the Virginia consent form was defective, but that the consent process cannot really be undone. Beg for forgiveness again. Declare that, in the future, the Office of the Presiding Bishop will work more closely with standing committees to assure them that the steps in the consent process for which they are responsible are carried out properly. Promise that, within 30 days, The Episcopal Church will have a downloadable, fillable PDF form on its Web site for standing committees to use in the future. All consents should be required to be executed using this form. (Actual signatures, of course, will still be needed.) Additional clarifications as to how consents may be submitted might need to be made. By canon, consents from standing committees are sent to the Presiding Bishop only after a sufficient number has been received. The Presiding Bishop should offer to pre-certify consents for a standing committee as they are received, however.
4. Apologize in writing to the San Joaquin standing committee for failure to reply to its correspondence, and thank its members for their contribution to improving important church procedures.
   
5. Beg for forgiveness again and promise to do better in the future.

Addendum

A few hours after I posted the foregoing, the Rev. Jan Nunley reported on EpiScope that both South Carolina and Virginia used the same form. Moreover, she says that this short form, whose wording differs from that specified in Canon III.11.4(b), has been in general use for 10 years or more. If indeed this is the case—I presume that she has checked, something I would have difficulty doing—then the Office of the Presiding Bishop is almost assuredly the source of the wrongly worded consent form. In this case, the current Presiding Bishop (and perhaps even the previous Presiding Bishop) may not be responsible for the church’s having run off the rails here. It does seem incumbent upon Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to fix the problem, however, and to fix it quickly. My advice as to what she should do still stands, but at least part of her apology must be for past church administration, rather than for her own mistakes.

If you want to read the canons for yourself, you can find the latest version of the church’s constitution and canons here.

Note: More developments in this story led me to write another essay on the subject the next day. You can read “Doing Consents Right Redux” here.

“Why Others Stand as Well”

Because my Web site and blog were always intended as outlets for my own work, I am not in the habit of calling attention to what others have written, except insofar as I want to offer my own criticism of it. In this post, I want to make an exception.

As many readers know, the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh is contemplating its future. (See the stories on the diocesan leadership meetings of May 20–21 and June 29.) Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan seems determined to lead a significant portion of his flock out of The Episcopal Church, which has been the very conspicuous object of his contempt since the 2003 General Convention.

The diocesan leadership has correctly concluded that most Episcopalians in the diocese are not well informed about what has been taking place within and beyond the Pittsburgh diocese. Many people, irrespective of their theological views, simply have not wanted to get involved. At many churches led by allies of the bishop, however, people have been deliberately kept in the dark or have been exposed only to diatribes against The Episcopal Church. As a split in the diocese becomes increasingly inevitable, everyone seems to agree that it is time to choose up sides, time to appeal to the hearts and minds of everyone occupying a pew within the diocese.

While the diocesan leadership has talked of the need for “education,” it has promoted an “interview” with the Rev. Dr. Leslie Fairfield called “Why We Stand.” Fairfield is professor emeritus at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, the Evangelically-oriented Episcopal seminary whose raison d’être has always been the winning over of The Episcopal Church to its narrow, reactionary theology or, failing that, the creation of an Evangelical replacement for it. “Why We Stand” misrepresents church history and paints a picture of The Episcopal Church, which, if true, would make me want to leave it.

When the Fairfield essay appeared on the diocesan Web site in early June, I saw it as yet another biased, self-serving contribution to church strife. Its distortions made me mad, but I tried to put it out of my mind. I had lost all respect for Fairfield’s “scholarship” after viewing the DVD “Choose This Day,” in which he says, among other things, “The choice facing the laity in the Episcopal Church is to choose between authentic Christianity and this alien religion which has permeated the leadership of the Episcopal Church in the last generation.” He also describes that “alien religion” as “foreign and alien and pagan” in his appearances on the DVD.

“Why We Stand” was hard to ignore, something I became aware of when I telephoned a young priest I have known since he first attended elementary school with my son. He told me that Professor Fairfield exactly captured his understanding of the present church conflict. I then discovered that other traditionalist priests are distributing the Fairfield interview to their parishioners to explain the conflict. The interview next showed up in Trinity, the diocesan newsletter, and I understand that it will be part of a packet of materials to be made available for Pittsburgh Episcopalians. Clearly, many nominal Episcopalians would be unmoved by being exposed to another point of view, but it was beginning to seem urgent that a rebuttal to Fairfield’s assertions be made available to those who might still be willing to listen to reason.

I did not feel qualified to write such a rebuttal. I am not a priest, a theologian, or a church historian, but I did know that The Episcopal Church as I experience it bears little resemblance to the one Fairfield describes in either “Choose This Day” or “Why We Stand.” In my search for a qualified author for an essay that would provide an alternative view, I discovered that Tobias Haller, Vicar of St. James, Fordham, in Brooklyn and author of the blog “In a Godward Direction,” had already written a brief piece about “Why We Stand” called “Stuff and Nonsense.” This was not the essay I thought was needed in Pittsburgh, but Tobias is a good writer and clearly viewed the Fairfield essay in the same light as I. After suggesting someone else who might write a good essay, Tobias agreed to try writing something himself. I soon had an essay from him in my inbox titled “Where Others Stand as Well.” It was not what I had been looking for—it was too short and not scholarly enough—but, upon reflection, I realized it was perfect for the task at hand.

But I said that I was calling attention to someone else’s work, not evaluating it. In spite of my extended introduction, I intend to stick to that pledge. You can find “Where Others Stand as Well” here or, as a PDF, here.

Missing Episcopal Words

Episcopalians have a reputation for—and perhaps even pride themselves on—having names for everything. Every architectural detail of a church and every liturgical object seems to have a special name, as do our rules, our meetings, our officers, and our very movements during worship. When writing about the church, however, I sometimes discover that we have failed to create a word where one is needed.

I got to thinking about this when I tried to write about church members resident within a particular diocese. Members of a parish, of course, are parishioners, but what are they vis-à-vis their diocese? If a bishop wants to send a letter to all laypeople under his or her care, what do we call the people being addressed?

Church Structure and Episcopalians. These questions are trickier than one might imagine, and it helps to begin by talking about church structures, which can provide a framework for understanding what some of the words are that Episcopalians have and, perhaps, need.

The Episcopal Church is often spoken of as a hierarchical church. We can, in fact, identify three distinct structural levels of the church. The most visible level is the one on which everyday worship and mission take place, the level of what we normally refer to as churches. Episcopalians certainly use this word—I attend St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Mt. Lebanon, for example—but they also use the more precise words parish, congregation, and mission. The most general of these terms is congregation, which simply denotes a worshiping community. A parish, on the other hand, is a financially independent congregation, and a mission is a congregation financially aided by the diocese. Congregation is used in two other ways. It may refer to the people of a worshiping community, as opposed to the local institution of which they are a part. There are also parishes (and perhaps even missions) that have more than one worship site, each of which has a separate congregation, though under common leadership.

At this local-church level, we speak of a parish’s parishioners. We might speak of congregants of any worshiping community, though, in practice, Episcopalians usually don’t. As far as I can determine, there is no special word for members of a mission. Missioners would seem to be a candidate, but I have never seen the word used this way. A canon missioner is often a person on a diocesan staff responsible for such matters as congregational development, however, which, I think, makes missioner a poor choice for designating a worshiper at a mission.

The geographical area served by The Episcopal Church is partitioned into dioceses, each led by a bishop. This is the next level in the church hierarchy, and considering it brings us back to our original question of what to call the laypeople of a diocese. They are not parishioners because not all of them belong to a parish. Although one could call them congregants, this would not distinguish them specifically as residents of a diocese. The Episcopal Church does talk about members (of a parish, say), but, technically, laypeople are not members of their diocese. Clergy, who are not considered members of the parishes they serve, are considered members of a diocese, though not always the one in which they live. Parishes and missions are not members of a diocese, by the way, but are described as being in union with the diocese, a quaint Episcopalian formulation.

The size of a diocese is often given as the number of communicants within diocesan congregations. There is a technical definition of communicant given in Canon I.17 which has to do with members who actually take communion in their local church, but this word, too, is not specifically tied to the diocese; one can speak of the number of communicants in a parish or in the entire church. Our missing word is still missing.

We can speak of Episcopalians in the diocese or Episcopalians of the diocese, but it would be handy to be able to use a single word instead. Dictionary.com suggests that diocesan can be used of clergy or laypersons of a diocese, but I have never encountered this usage within The Episcopal Church, and it invites confusion with usage of the same word to mean diocesan bishop. (Speaking of diocesans would be confusing indeed, as only one bishop in a diocese can be the diocesan bishop.)

I should mention that dioceses in The Episcopal Church are organized into provinces, not to be confused with the regional-church members of the Anglican Communion sometime referred to by the same term. The nine provinces of the church represent something of a degenerate level—in the mathematical, not the moral sense—of the church hierarchy. Dioceses usually interact directly with the top level of the church hierarchy, although some interactions are mediated by provinces. Nobody speaks of Episcopal provincials—the members, say, of Province III—or seems to have any pressing need to do so.

At the top level of our Episcopal hierarchy are what we might call the trans-diocesan elements of the church, those people and institutions concerned with the church as a whole: the Episcopal Church Center in New York City, the Presiding Bishop, the General Convention, and so forth. We refer to all the structures and people of the church as The Episcopal Church, but we often need to speak specifically of the top level of the hierarchy. Episcopalians used to speak of the National Church, but this term has fallen into disfavor, as The Episcopal Church has dioceses in areas outside of the United States. One could hardly refer to the International Church, as this would invite confusion with the Anglican Communion, which is “more” international, even though it isn’t a church at all. There is, I think, a pressing need to find a replacement for National Church, though I don’t know that many people are working actively on the problem. The recent appellate court decision in California refers to the general church. I’m not sure this phrase has a chance of catching on, but it (or, perhaps, General Church) is not an unreasonable substitute for the politically incorrect National Church. at least until someone comes up with something better.

A different Problem. as long as I’m talking about names for church structures, the matter of the name of the church itself is, I suppose, unavoidable. In this instance, rather than having a dearth of names, we have a surfeit. One need only read a handful of newspaper articles on The Episcopal Church to know that there is confusion about what to call it. At the time that people were referring to the National Church, the church was commonly called ECUSA, the Episcopal Church (USA), or the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. In actuality, none of these was quite appropriate. The official name of the church is the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. This is the name in the constitution of 1789 and all of its successors. In times past, therefore, the church was sometimes referred to as PECUSA, although the acronym is seldom used today.

In fact, Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America seems to have been a good name choice for what had been part of the Church of England but suddenly found itself in a new, independent Republic. It reflects both the Protestant and Catholic (in the word Episcopal, of course) heritage of Anglicanism. Over the years, Episcopal became less of a description, however, and more of a brand name, which gradually made Protestant seem like a denial of any Catholic heritage, hence ECUSA. Anglicanism has always seen itself as neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant, but as some synthesis of the two.

In fact, the Preamble to the church’s constitution, which was added in 1967, and which has been used by traditionalists to claim that acting contrary to the wishes of the Anglican Communion—however one might determine that to be the case—is a violation of the constitution, actually had virtually nothing to do with the Anglican Communion and everything to do with what to call the church. For years, Anglo-Catholics wanted to remove Protestant from the church’s name, and Evangelicals passionately opposed the change. Various other alternatives were proposed and rejected over the years. By the time the church seemed able to change its name without inviting schism, questions were raised as to whether a name change would have any untoward legal consequences. The “solution” was to keep the original name and to make official the common name of the church: “The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, otherwise known as The Episcopal Church (which name is hereby recognized as also designating the Church)….” The business about the Anglican Communion in the preamble was thrown in as lagniappe without any substantial discussion by the General Convention.

A new sensitivity to the constitution’s Preamble has led to the church’s being officially called The Episcopal Church or TEC, as opposed to all the forms discussed above, and as opposed to the Episcopal Church, which, all things being equal, seems more natural. (It used to be common to include The in front of institutional names—think of The Borden Company, for example—but, in 21st-century America, the church is bucking the trend.) The change seems to have been the brainchild of the director of Episcopal News Service—perhaps this organ now should be called The Episcopal News Service—and one could argue that it has only led to confusion and occasional derision. In any case, the capitalized article in the Preamble, although a product of the mid-20th century, probably reflects 18th-century orthography more than it does the intention of the General Convention always to put The before the name of the church.

As if the foregoing was not confusing enough, one sometimes encounters the name Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. (One can reach the church’s Web site using either the URL http://episcopalchurch.org or http://dfms.org. I tend to use the latter, which is shorter.) The Episcopal Church, governed by the General Convention, has never been incorporated. The DFMS was created in the early nineteenth century by the General Convention and incorporated in the state of New York. For all practical purposes, the DFMS is The Episcopal Church, although the distinction matters in certain legal contexts.

A Side Issue: In enumerating the circumstances of people overseen by a diocesan bishop, all of whom may be called Episcopalians, the general name for members of the church, I began to wonder if there might be Episcopalians in a diocese who are not members of a specific worshiping community. I think the answer is no, but the matter isn’t clear-cut. According to church canon, a church member moving from one parish, say, to another, should execute a formal transfer. This does not always happen, so that, technically, the person remains a member of his or her old parish. The canons do not address the possibility of leaving one congregation and going nowhere in particular, but people do ask to be removed from parish registers without joining another church elsewhere, be it Episcopal or otherwise. A person doing this may have a self-image as an Episcopalian, but the church has no way of counting that person among its members.

Update, 8/22/2014. Since I wrote the above post, http://dfms.org/ has ceased to take the visitor to the Episcopal Church site. Instead, a page is displayed whose title is “Home” and which displays “DFMS” and “Welcome” in large letters. The page directs the visitor to “www.episcopalchurch.org.” Unhelpfully, the (incomplete) URL is not actually a link, so getting to the real church site is not as easy as one might like. There are also icons at the left edge of the page for Facebook, Twitter, etc., the purpose of which is something of a mystery. See my post “Home at the DFMS.”

“Troops”

If truth is the first casualty of war, perhaps language is the second. I am thinking about “troop,” a veteran English word that is daily misused by the media. As I write this, for example, the USA Today Web site carries a headline “Military: Eight American troops killed in Iraq.” The story begins: “Iraq's prime minister and two top American officials flew to the blistering western desert … hours before the military reported the deaths of eight U.S. troops.”

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, the noun “troop” indicates either a great many or a group of people, animals, or things. More specifically, it may designate a group of soldiers, a fighting unit (such as a cavalry troop), or a unit of the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts under an adult leader. In the plural, it refers to soldiers or military units. In strict usage, if eight American troops were killed, then a very substantial massacre occurred, perhaps involving 100 or more individuals.

Whatever a “troop” is, it is not an individual. One would certainly not say that a cavalry troop consisted of twenty troops or that Boy Scout Troop 16 has 25 troops. We do not see wives on television fretting over their husbands deployed to Iraq and saying, “I pray that my troop comes home safely.” And I have never heard a soldier refer to “my fellow troops.”

Why, then, is “troop” regularly, if erroneously, used in news reports to refer to individuals? Certainly, in times past, we would hear of our “soldiers,” “men,” or “boys” being casualties of war. In Iraq, however, the casualties may not all be male, and they may come from different services. An infantryman and a marine cannot really be described as “soldiers.” If speaking of similar individuals, one can imagine reporters using “soldiers,” “sailors,” “marines,” “airmen,” or even “men.” “Boys” is more problematic these days, and, if African-Americans are being referred to, is completely unacceptable. “Girls” would offend women, and it must be said that reporting the death of “two of our women” carries some emotional baggage not entailed by “two of our men.”

The obvious general words that could be used all starkly emphasize what our troops—I use the word properly here—are really about: “warriors,” “fighters,” or “combatants.” Other possibilities abandon objectivity or indulge in irony: “aggressors,” “occupiers,” “referees,“ “peacekeepers,” “nation-builders,” or “hapless victims of President Bush’s obsession.”

One can see why reporters continue to misuse “troops.”

Reflecting on Responding to the Study Guide

I’ve spent a good deal of time the last couple of days answering the questions asked by The Episcopal Church in “A Short Study Guide to Aid The Episcopal Church in Responding to the Draft Anglican Covenant as Prepared by the Covenant Design Group.” This was not an easy task. Even after having invested much energy in the project, I have not produced definitive essays on the proposed covenant, though I trust that others’ work will complement my own efforts.

Answering the 14 questions posed by the Executive Council was something of a double obligation for me. As an active combatant in the ongoing church wars—I know that some people don’t like such metaphors—I would have seemed derelict had I not addressed the questions about the covenant. Along with other members of Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh (PEP)—and, in particular, President Joan Gundersen—I had produced both a worksheet for people to use to record their answers, as well as a collection of materials to provide context for the task. How could I not see how these resources worked in practice?

You can read my answers and find links to relevant material by going to “Responding to the Study Guide” on my Web site. What I want to do here is to offer some observations about my experience.

The Study Guide. I quickly learned that the Study Guide is pretty lean in the easy question department. Its questions are quite specific and are not always the ones you most want to answer. No doubt, this is intended to elicit feedback on particular issues and to discourage shallow, rambling, or irrational responses. It is difficult to see any overt bias in the questions, and those on both the left and right may find them maddeningly “objective.” The questions are certainly comprehensive, however, and, since essay answers are expected, no one should feel that his or her thought on the covenant cannot fully be expressed. The Study Guide questions proceed from the specific to the general, which may not be to everyone’s taste. I will have more to say about this below.

If the details of the questions do not discourage you from sharing your opinions with The Episcopal Church, seeing someone else’s answers might. I have been encouraging several fellow parishioners to answer the Study Guide questions, but, when I showed them my answers, their reaction was that they were insufficiently prepared for the task. That may be true, or I may simply be obsessive.

Preparation. Having been following Anglican conflicts for many years now, I was reasonably well prepared to address the questions at hand. I must admit, though, that I felt more like I was taking a final exam than like I was responding to a questionnaire. The term “Study Guide”—it is actually called “A Short Study Guide”— is not so much an aid to study as a prod to study. If you expect to answer its 14 questions, plan to read the obviously relevant documents several times over, and expect to need reference material close at hand as you work. It is difficult to evaluate the covenant without already having a good understanding of the events that brought the Anglican Communion to its present state. That background is difficult to obtain in a hurry, so anyone who looks at the Study Guide or the report from the Covenant Design Group (CDG) and says, “What is this?” should probably just forget the whole thing.

Tools. PEP’s “Evaluating the Draft Covenant,” which collects many pertinent documents into a single PDF file with search capabilities and a digital table of contents, proved invaluable. I kept the document open all the time I was working on my answers. Although I did not consult Joan Gundersen’s annotations of the CDG report on a question-by-question basis, I did read all her notes and fond them quite helpful in framing an overall view of the proposed covenant. I did go back to Joan’s annotations to clarify particular points.

I also used the PEP Microsoft Word worksheet to record my answers. This was very helpful for organizing and presenting my thoughts, though I discovered that Word text form fields, which are used in the worksheet, have some peculiar properties that I cannot find documented anywhere. Text was easy to enter, but it was sometimes difficult to edit. (Hint: If you are having trouble positioning the cursor within your text, try using the arrow keys.) Were I to do everything over again, I think I would keep the PEP worksheet open in one Word window, but type and edit my text in another. When I was satisfied with an answer, I would copy and paste it into the PEP document. (PEP may try making a PDF form with Acrobat next time it perceives a need for such a mechanism.)

Getting It Down. I would recommend developing a good overall view of what you want to say before you start answering specific questions or even studying the questions in detail. This will help assure that you get to say all the things you believe are important. You might even jot down indications of the points you want to make. There will still likely be issues you have not considered that will be raised by the Study Guide, but this approach will minimize the problem of what to say and focus your attention on where to say it. That the PEP worksheet extracts the questions from the full Study Guide text is helpful at this point, and it might be useful to assign your points to make to specific questions. I did find myself making similar statements in more than one place, but this is probably inevitable and possibly even desirable (see below).

One’s psychological makeup or intellectual preferences may have a bearing on how comfortably you are using the Study Guide. I found myself wanting first to write a summary of my reaction to the draft covenant, whose conclusions I could then support with specifics, but the Study Guide focuses on the particular before it treats the general. Episcopalians with my inclinations may want to answer the last few questions before returning to the first ones. I was concerned about procrastinating, so I forced myself to begin at the beginning and skip no questions. No one will know if you do otherwise, however.

Aggregating the Answers. Some people have suggested that the difficulty of the questions asked in the Study Guide and the short time allowed for responses (less than two months) will mean that few responses from Episcopalians will be forthcoming, and most of those will be from institutional respondents. (I see that the General Convention deputation from the Diocese of New York has posted its answers to the questions on the Web.) Some cynics have suggested that the Executive Council actually wanted to discourage responses and wasn’t planning to pay much attention to those it did receive. I’m not that cynical, but I do wonder if the Study Guide authors considered carefully how data was to be handled. Whereas multiple-choice and true-false questions can be reduced to easily assimilated statistics, complex essays cannot be. Moreover, answers will likely be long. Although I cannot know if the length of mine will prove typical, the answers from the New York deputation certainly cannot be described as terse.

Will those responsible for presenting the responses of Episcopalians to the Executive Council analyze data by question or by whole response? Will they try to reduce answers to statistical summaries, or will they try to identify responses from particular people or groups that are somehow representative of distinct positions? Who know? That there is only a week between the deadline for responses and the beginning of the June Executive Council meeting makes me thankful that I personally don’t have to figure out what to do.

The data-analysis problem actually has consequences for respondents. One should not worry about making a point more than once, particularly if it is especially pertinent to more than one question. The redundancy makes it more likely that your voice will be heard. Since all one’s answers may not be kept together, it is a good idea to avoid cross-referencing your answers; repeat a point if it needs to be made in more than one place. On the other hand, it would be wise to be sure that you actually do answer every question directly and in the form it is asked. This will help assure that the points you make are noticed and not misunderstood.

Good Luck. If you’re planning to submit your responses to the Study Guide, be aware that you have less than two weeks in which to do so. (Answers are due by June 4.) Time to get to work if you have not already begun. Good luck!

Helping Episcopalians Put in Their Two Cents’ Worth

A bit less than a month ago, the Executive Council of The Episcopal Church issued “A Short Study Guide to Aid The Episcopal Church in Responding to the Draft Anglican Covenant As Prepared by the Covenant Design Group.” This six-page document with the catchy title asks 14 detailed, non-leading questions about the Anglican covenant as proposed by the Covenant Design Group (CDG) in January. Episcopalians have been asked to answer the questions and to send their answers to the secretary of the General Convention to help the church formulate its response to the covenant draft.

Whatever one thinks of the covenant, it is clear that it has the potential to change The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion in profound ways. (I doubt that anyone, liberal, conservative, or otherwise, believes the claim of the CDG that there is nothing new in the draft.) The Study Guide provides a mechanism for all Episcopalians to have some influence on how our church deals with the covenant proposal. Answering the questions is not a simple matter, however, as they call for a close analysis of the draft. Nonetheless, Episcopalians of every stripe should welcome this opportunity to influence what our church does at this critical time in its history. Episcopalians will have only themselves to blame if they fail to offer their opinions and the church’s response turns out not to be to their liking.

I don’t know that the church has a good plan for how it will handle the answers it receives. It could be dealing with over 2 million responses, handwritten, faxed, printed, and e-mailed. Realistically, of course, that number will be much smaller, perhaps very small indeed. Making sense of them will still be a problem, however, as the Study Guide did not offer a uniform submission mechanism.

Into this breach comes Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh with a Microsoft Word form to help people organize and record their thoughts. The form is a Word document containing fields to enter one’s personal information (name, parish, etc.—the Study Guide did not explicitly ask for this), followed by the 14 questions, interspersed with fields for one’s answers. The form is both convenient to use and, I hope, helpful to the hapless folks who have to tabulate all the answers received by the church. The worksheet and its instructions can be downloaded from PEP’s Web site here. The Lead (a blog of the new Episcopal Café) already has a story on the Worksheet.

I hope that people will not be intimidated by the worksheet, which looks more complicated than it is. It is accompanied by a set of instructions to put the task at hand into context—links are provided to the Study Guide and to the CDG report—and to explain how to use a Microsoft Word form, a process that is fairly intuitive, but which can can also be frustrating until one gets the hang of it. The instruction sheet is as long as it is in order to be as helpful as possible to all Word users, including those with the latest version of the software (Word 2007), and to accommodate both PC and Mac users.

Just for the record, the idea for the form came from Joan Gundersen, PEP’s president. I developed the form and its instructions. Several people acted as testers for the project, and they deserve special thanks—Jane Little, Jack Harmon, Mary Jane Amick, and Ben Mudd. Any mistakes, however, are my responsibility, and I hope people will report them to me, so that I can correct them.

Responses to the Study Guide are due by June 4. Download the worksheet and get to work.

Reading the Signs

I drove to a client’s house this morning and encountered an unusual number of curious signs.

A major intersection is just over a mile from my house. Invariably, I encounter a line of cars there awaiting a change of the traffic signal. (Protected left turns from four directions lengthen the signal cycle time.) Today, I saw a new sign as I approached the inevitable stopped vehicles. The large, diamond-shaped orange sign said, simply, “BUMP.” A question immediately came to mind: Was the legend on the sign a noun or a verb? As it happens, the road I was about to cross is being resurfaced and recently had been milled, making it lower than the road I was driving on.

A bit farther along, I came to another intersection, just before which I saw signage that said “END SPEED LIMIT 35.” As the car passed that signpost, I noticed similar signage on the other side of the intersection announcing “BEGIN SPEED LIMIT 35.” What, I wondered, was the speed limit on the 500 or so feet of roadway between the two signs.

The next odd sign I encountered was one I have been seeing with increasing frequency. It is a tall, narrow sign placed in the center of the roadway at pedestrian crosswalks. “Reading” from top to bottom, the sign says “STATE LAW,” followed by a triangular yield sign, the word “TO,” a stylized figure of a pedestrian, and the words “WITHIN CROSSWALK.” By now, I know what the sign means, but, on encountering it for the first time, it seems more like a puzzle to be solved quickly as one is driving past, a kind of traffic rebus dreamed up by a Chinese engineer who does not have a full grasp of idiomatic English. Crosswalks seem to inspire this sort of thing, or am I the only person who finds the sequence of street markings "“PED,” “X,” “ING” just before crosswalks annoying?

Finally, I want to mention a sign I did not actually see on my car trip today, but which I did see while taking a walk this afternoon. In the window of a barber shop near my house—yes, it really is an old-fashioned barber shop, as indicated by the big “BARBER SHOP” sign overhead—there is a sign indicating when the establishment is open. The sign reads as follows:

Shop Hours
Wed., Fri., Sat.
9:00 AM ’til Closing
Thurs.
4:00 PM ’til Closing

If a customer arrives at 4 o’clock on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday, what is the probability of being able to get a haircut? I have no idea what the answer is.

Following the Rules

The April 8 issue of The Living Church carried a story about Mark Lawrence’s failure to receive adequate consents to be consecrated as South Carolina’s next bishop. The same issue contained an editorial calling the failure “a tragedy for the entire church.” The May 6 issue offers two letters in response to the magazine’s coverage of the Lawrence affair.

In the first letter, the Rev. John Rawlinson of St. James Episcopal Church in Oakland, California, takes the magazine to task over its editorial, focusing on the assertion that “Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori decided to follow canon law to the letter in ruling the process invalid” [emphasis added]. Rawlinson pointed out that Jefferts Schori was obliged to follow canon law. (She was also obliged to allow only 120, not 123 days for consents to be submitted, but that point is moot, I suppose, at least as far as Lawrence is concerned.)

The second letter is mine, which is reproduced below as it appears in The Living Church:

The article, “Presiding Bishop Invalidates South Carolina Election,” and the editorial, “Failure to Consent Leaves Everyone a Loser,” misinterpret events.

Any balloting procedure must ensure the validity of votes cast. Because South Carolina’s choice of bishop was controversial, particular care was needed to ensure that the legitimacy of the consent process, whatever its result, would be unquestioned. That process did not generate sufficient consents by the date required, and it did not generate enough valid consents, even after the extra three days allowed by the Presiding Bishop. Assuming that the standing committee read the canons and examined the consents it received, its members must have known that some consents were invalid.

Bishop-elect Mark Lawrence received insufficient consents not because of his theology, but because of what he said he would do to the church. He has not been denied consecration because of “things he was reported or reputed to have said or written,” but because of statements he unquestionably made—some of them in TLC—that suggested his unwillingness to be bound by the canons of The Episcopal Church.

The church’s consent process for episcopal elections is not a mere formality, but an important, substantive check on dioceses that may have made questionable choices. The message in this sorry affair is not that “there is no longer room in The Episcopal Church for bishops who uphold traditional Anglican teaching.” It is that the church is growing impatient with bishops who cannot respect its polity and will not abide its law.

Lionel Deimel
Pittsburgh, Pa.

Both letters, then, emphasize the obligation of those in ordained orders to abide by Episcopal Church canons. It is annoying that Episcopalians have to point out this obligation over and over, and yet the church’s militant traditionalists cannot seem to bring themselves to acknowledge it, calling those who raise the issue “canonical fundamentalists.” To this, I propose a question: Why should we defer to the opinions of these people on matters of scriptural interpretation—firm opinions based on ambiguous, if not contradictory texts that cannot be verified as definitive—when they seem incapable of finding the “plain meaning” in straightforward instructions written in the modern era?

Here We Go Again

To hardly anyone’s surprise, the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina has announced that it will attempt again to make the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence its next bishop. In particular, the following announcement has been posted on the South Carolina Web site:

Statement of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina for immediate release

On September 16, 2006, the people of the Diocese of South Carolina overwhelmingly elected the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence as our next bishop on the first ballot. We are fully persuaded that the Holy Spirit spoke in that election and we were reassured that a majority of both bishops and standing committee’s [sic] intended to consent to this election. We are determined to carry forward our diocesan mission within the context of the canons which give order to our common life.

Accordingly, at our meeting today, we unanimously passed a resolution reconvening the 216th annual meeting of the Diocese of South Carolina, which was recessed. At that re-convened meeting, we will request that the convention take the necessary steps to allow the calling of a special convention later in the summer for the purpose of again electing the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence. Formal notification will follow shortly.

Charleston, SC
April 17, 2007

Immediately after Lawrence failed to achieve the requisite consents for his consecration, many people speculated that South Carolina would indeed elect Lawrence again to be its next bishop. They further speculated that, the next time around, consents would easily be obtained. The theory seemed to be that denying consents is a rare occurrence that The Episcopal Church would not have the will to pull off twice in a row. The determination of South Carolina, combined with the closely divided first-round result, seemed as though it might work in Lawrence’s favor.

Or maybe not. The speculation about South Carolina’s future was articulated before the spring House of Bishops meeting, which may have been a turning point in Episcopal Church history. Our bishops now seem to have an increased awareness of the need to protect the constitution of The Episcopal Church against all enemies, foreign and domestic. In particular, there seems now to be a widespread understanding—at long last, one must say—that certain members of the House of Bishops do not simply dissent from majority viewpoints, but are actively working to overthrow The Episcopal Church and to replace it with a fundamentalist caricature of an American Anglican church. From this perspective, Mark Lawrence does not so much look like a wronged priest deserving of a second chance at obtaining justice, as he does a fox knocking at the hen house door. The bishops with jurisdiction, who voted to consent to his consecration last time around, may well reject his cause this time, irrespective of what standing committees do. To everyone’s astonishment, The Episcopal Church has shown that it is not a rubber stamp for anyone a diocese might elect bishop, and the House of Bishops has shown that it is not a rubber stamp for the tyrannical edicts of the Primates’ Meeting.

The South Carolina Standing Committee is convinced that “the Holy Spirit spoke” in its episcopal election. Perhaps its members should consider that it is equally likely that the Holy Spirit spoke in the rejection of Mark Lawrence by diocesan standing committees. Rather than showing how stubborn South Carolinians can be, the Standing Committee might well consider starting an episcopal search process from the beginning, with a new consultant, with greater respect for the moderate Episcopalians in the diocese, and without determining the outcome in advance.

I do not, of course, expect this suggestion to be taken seriously by the South Carolina Standing Committee.

The Covenant We Do Need

The Anglican Communion is out of control, and The Episcopal Church doesn’t look too well-ordered, either. Outrageously bad behavior is being widely tolerated, and orderly processes can no longer be relied upon.

Most Episcopalians reading this could write a couple of sentences which, when appended to the previous paragraph, would support its thesis. Not everyone would agree on what the proper evidence is, however.

My own list would certainly include the recent departure from The Episcopal Church of retired Bishop William J. Cox for the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone. Bishop Cox, you may recall, performed various Episcopal acts in Kansas in 2005 at the behest of the Archbishop of Uganda, but without permission of the Bishop of Kansas. This certainly looked like (1) a presentable offense against the canons of The Episcopal Church and (2) improper interference in the local affairs of one Anglican province by another. No disciplinary action was taken immediately, but a presentment was eventually brought against Bishop Cox. Earlier this month, the presentment was deemed serious enough to warrant an actual trial, and it appeared that the bishop might at last receive his just desserts. We have just been informed, however, that Bishop Cox has told the Presiding Bishop that he is leaving The Episcopal Church for a more sympathetic province.

In essence, Bishop Cox has jumped bail and left town. Since The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone are in the same “Communion,” you might expect that we would have an extradition treaty with Southern Cone that would return the accused to the proper jurisdiction, where he could be tried. Of course, you would be wrong. When any province is angry with any other province, nothing in the Anglican Communion works the way you think it should.

We have heard a lot recently about an Anglican covenant, an idea floated in the Windsor Report, and a concept that even the General Convention—inadvisedly and without adequate consideration, I think—has bought into. Parties within the Anglican Communion seem to have wildly different ideas about the nature of such a covenant. The Episcopal Church has suggested—hoping against hope, really—that it will be all about how provinces do mission together. Many of the primates, on the other hand, want to see a covenant that is (1) a confession of faith binding upon all member churches and (2) an agreement whereby (1) is next to impossible to modify. Their object is to return and to maintain the Anglican Communion safely in the seventeenth century or whenever it was that the Universal Church or the Church of England or Cromwell or somebody—I have no idea who—“had it right.”

Whereas the “covenant process,” from the point of view of The Episcopal Church, seems headed off in the wrong direction, a covenant among Communion members is not necessarily a bad idea. The Anglican Communion is an amazingly fuzzy entity, operating largely without any rules whatever, and certainly without rules agreed to by everyone involved. The exception in this chaos is the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), which is the most representative Communion body, including bishops, priests, and laypeople among its members. (There are no deacon members of the ACC, but that is a concern for another day.) Moreover, the ACC has a formal constitution and bylaws. These are all about how the ACC works, however, and not how the Anglican Communion works.

In watching the actions of the Anglican Communion over the past several years, I have been most distressed by the violations of conventions that I thought were understood and agreed to by all—that bishops do not act in other jurisdictions without having been invited to do so by the local bishop, that the Lambeth Conference and Primates’ Meeting are only consultative bodies without any substantive authority, that communion between provinces is necessarily mutual, etc. Essentially, these rules are being changed unilaterally. The effect, in some instances, is to centralize authority, but in others, it is just to spread chaos. The Episcopal Church should, I think, acknowledge these trends and announce that it will do everything within its power to reverse them and to work for an Anglican Communion governed by rules that everyone understands and has agreed to.

The foregoing considerations have caused me to change my mind about the need for an Anglican covenant. I now do believe that a covenant is needed. The covenant we need before we begin examining theological differences among provinces, however, is one that specifies clearly the fundamental privileges and obligations of Communion membership. Each province of the Communion should ratify this covenant before any future business not directly related to mission is conducted by the Communion. Among the basic principles that a covenant should establish are the following:

1. That the Archbishop of Canterbury cannot discriminate in his invitations to the Lambeth Conference. All bishops of a particular kind must be invited or not.
2. That no primate may be excluded from the Primates’ Meeting.
   
3. That diocesan boundaries are inviolable.
4. That jurisdictions should not overlap.
5. That breaking communion with one province breaks communion with all.
6. That Communion-wide rules govern the transfer of ordained persons from a jurisdiction in one province to a jurisdiction in another.
   

Well, you get the idea. No doubt, there will have to be rules for which specified penalties apply if they are broken. (This takes us to a potentially slippery slope if we wish to avoid building a cumbersome judicial mechanism for the Communion. I don’t claim to have all the answers here.) Personally, I would like to see the Primates’ Meeting abolished and more responsibility given to the ACC, which should meet more often. No doubt, it has been argued that it is too expensive for the larger ACC to meet more frequently, but I suspect that this is not the case, since the ordinary clergy and laypeople who make up the ACC will likely accept not flying to meetings first-class.

Oh, I should mention one other essential rule for a covenant. No bishop, priest, or deacon should be allowed to transfer between jurisdictions to avoid ecclesiastical discipline.

Stupid Chess

In his radio address today, President Bush repeated his promise to veto any bill providing additional funding for the Iraq war if it includes a timetable for withdrawal. Both the House and Senate have passed such bills, and it seems likely, though not certain, that any final bill will contain some form of timetable.

Congress should not be intimidated by Bush’s bluster. What can the President do? Yes, he can veto the appropriation bill, but there is a problem. Eventually, he needs the money to prosecute the war, and only Congress can give it too him. It doesn’t matter if, as the administration contends, the Congress cannot override a presidential veto. If the President vetoes the bill and Congress fails to override it, it is the stubbornness of the President that will be responsible for the nation’s inability to “support the troops.”

World-class chess players look many moves ahead. If it is clear that all possible moves lead to their defeat, they resign. The current rhetorical skirmishes between the Congress and the President are aimed at determining just what each side is willing to do. If the Democrats can craft a final bill that will pass both houses, and if they are willing to resist pressure to pass a second post-veto bill without a timetable, they will have maneuvered themselves into a winning position on the chessboard.

Of course, Bush is too stubborn to resign. He will veto the bill, gloat over the sustaining of his veto, and insist that a new bill be sent to him without a timetable. At that point, Congress should simply do nothing. Eventually, the military will need more money, and the American people, who want to end this insane war, will insist that the President swallow his pride and accept what he has insisted is unacceptable. The bill that the President will have to sign at the end of this process will be less to his liking than the one he will have vetoed.

“Bovine Sue”

Sue Boulden, a widely-known activist for various causes, particularly for an inclusive Episcopal Church, died on March 27, 2007, on the eve of her 64th birthday. Without Sue, Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh (PEP) would not exist. Her passion drove the group that became PEP. She was its informal leader until we introduced a modicum of organization, making Sue and me “co-conveners” for a time. (I never quite knew what that meant.)

Sue was never embarrassed to represent truth and justice as she saw it, even if that made everyone, including her friends, uncomfortable. Sue’s most recent project had been the resurrection of the long-dormant Pittsburgh chapter of Integrity.

I have written an elegy to Sue—I am beginning to find that I am writing too many of my poems to honor departed friends—that I have titled “Bovine Sue.” You can find the poem here, where I have also explained the somewhat unusual title.

Reflections on the Mark Lawrence Affair

Three days after the announcement of the failure of the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence to achieve the consents necessary to be consecrated Bishop of South Carolina, much has been written about the consent process and the significance of its outcome. Particularly because the Mark Lawrence affair played out against a larger context of Anglican controversy, it may be too early to write of its ultimate significance, but it is a good time to point out misconceptions and to argue against what I believe to represent mistaken opinion—even if it is (or was) my own—lest it become conventional wisdom. Eschewing the role of historian, therefore, I take up that of commentator.

“Null and Void”

The first indication that Lawrence’s bid for consecration had failed came from the Rev. J. Haden McCormick, President of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina, who began his announcement on the diocesan Web site as follows: “I received a phone call late this afternoon from the Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori giving notification that she was declaring null and void the election of The Very Rev. Mark Lawrence to be bishop of The Diocese of South Carolina.” The lead in the AP story released a short time later was: “Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori took the highly unusual step Thursday of invalidating the election of a bishop in the tradition-minded Diocese of South Carolina, which has rejected her authority because of her liberal theological outlook.”

Neither McCormick’s statement nor that of AP religion writer Rachel Zoll was untrue, but, to the average reader, they may have given the impression that the Presiding Bishop, upset with what had been a rather messy referendum, had simply decided to declare it improper and to ask the diocese to start the episcopal election process over from the beginning. Certainly, some Lawrence supporters concluded that the leader of The Episcopal Church had abused her office by taking unusual and prejudicial action against their candidate. Even the Episcopal News Service story repeated the phrase “null and void.” In explaining what had happened, that story cited Sections 4(a), 4(b), and 8 of Canon III.11, but it failed to cite Section 5, which reads as follows:

In case a majority of all the Standing Committees of the Dioceses do not consent to the ordination of the Bishop-elect within one hundred and twenty days from the date of the notification of the election by the Standing Committee of the Diocese for which the Bishop was elected, or in case a majority of all the Bishops exercising jurisdiction do not consent within one hundred and twenty days from the date of notification to them by the Presiding Bishop of the election, the Presiding Bishop shall declare the election null and void and shall give notice to the Standing Committee of the Diocese for which the Bishop was elected and to the Bishop-elect. The Convention of the Diocese may then proceed to a new election.

Clearly, the Presiding Bishop was doing exactly what she was required to do by Episcopal Church canon. She was not “throwing out” the referendum on Mark Lawrence; she was declaring that, when all the votes were counted, the referendum had lost. The press can perhaps be excused for missing this subtle point, but Episcopalians generally—and ENS, in particular—should have tried to communicate the distinction more clearly to the wider public.

Canonical Changes?

Because some of the consents obtained from standing committees for Lawrence’s consecration were defective—it is still not yet clear which were defective and how—some people have alleged that confusion caused by recent canonical changes were, to some measure, responsible for Lawrence’s rejection. Although changes were made to the canons by the 2006 General Convention, this particular argument is simply not sustainable. There were revisions to Title III in 2006, and what is now Canon III.11 was, in the 2003 revision of the canons, Canon III.16. A careful reading of the relevant sections reveals little difference and virtually no substantive difference, even though material has been rearranged a bit. In any case, the requirement for signed testimonials for bishops-elect apparently goes back to 1789 and for such signed testimonials from standing committees for bishops not approved at the General Convention to 1799, according to White’s and Dykman’s definitive Annotated Constitution and Canons.

Lawrence supporters have blamed the Presiding Bishop for failure to notify standing committees of their faulty testimonials giving consent, but, in actual fact, it was the South Carolina Standing Committee that was responsible, by canon, both for soliciting and collecting consents, none of which were to be sent to the Presiding Bishop until a majority of standing committees consented. One must wonder if the Standing Committee of South Carolina was too busy counting consents to actually look at them. In any case, it is difficult to see how the Standing Committee could misunderstand Canon III.11.4(b):

Evidence of the consent of each Standing Committee shall be a testimonial in the following words, signed by a majority of all the members of the Committee:

We, being a majority of all the members of the Standing Committee of ______________, and having been duly convened at ______________, fully sensible how important it is that the Sacred Order and Office of a Bishop should not be unworthily conferred, and firmly persuaded that it is our duty to bear testimony on this solemn occasion without partiality, do, in the presence of Almighty God, testify that we know of no impediment on account of which the Reverend A.B. ought not to be ordained to that Holy Order. In witness whereof, we have hereunto set our hands this _____ day of _________in the year of our Lord _________.
(Signed) _______________

Adequate Consents or Not?

It is apparently the case that, on March 9, South Carolina had not received the required 56 consents. At that point, the Standing Committee would normally have informed the Presiding Bishop that this was the case, and the matter of Lawrence’s status as bishop-elect would have changed to rejected bishop-elect. (I say “normally,” but, in fact, this situation has not occurred since 1875.) The Presiding Bishop, with the advice of her Chancellor, David Booth Beers, had allowed South Carolina another three days to obtain consents, and, at the end of that period, 57 consents, reputedly, were in hand. These were forwarded to the Office of the Presiding Bishop and were the basis on which Katharine Jefferts Schori made her judgment about the failure of the consent process on March 15. Seven testimonials were found to be defective for such causes as carrying no actual signatures. Why, Lawrence’s supporters asked, could not the Presiding Bishop simply go back to the relevant standing committees and ask for corrected testimonials?

There is, of course, no canonical authority for requesting “proper” testimonials after the consent period has expired. Consents from standing committees are handled much like absentee ballots in civil elections. Ballots must be received by a certain date and must be properly executed, which, in any jurisdiction I know about, requires that they be signed by the voter. Consents, like absentee ballots, are not officially tabulated until the election is over. The only difference is that, whereas in a civil elections, absentee ballots are usually not even opened until the polls are closed, the standing committee of a diocese that has elected a bishop can not only look at consents but can send them back for correction if they are not in order. Does the consent process really have to be more forgiving than this? The Episcopal Church even let standing committees vote twice, and some standing committees did give consent after first withholding it. Episcopal canons do not clearly allow this—nor disallow this, it must be said—but such multiple voting would never be allowed in the civil sphere, where one’s vote would be disallowed if a person voted twice.

One might have wished that Lawrence’s supporters would have been grateful for having been given an extra three days to vote. Instead, they have complained that, having been given one dispensation, they should be granted yet another.

120 Days = 123 Days

In an earlier post, I argued that South Carolina should not have been granted an extra three days for the consent process to be completed. Whereas the favor was intended as a gracious gesture, it was not graciously accepted by those it was intended to help, and it was, I firmly believe, a completely unjustified violation of church canons. “One hundred and twenty days” is, well, 120 days. Let me put that in a way that will be clear, if uncharitable: Allowing 123 days was unfair and illegal. I have no doubt that, had Gene Robinson been required to submit to the same consent process as Mark Lawrence, he would not have been granted the same “grace period,” mostly because everyone could anticipate that the right wing of the church would cry foul, and it would be completely justified in its indignation. Liberals and moderates, however, are assumed to be nice people, so, except for me, virtually everyone has kept quiet about the three extra days. (Mind you, I gave up vying for Miss Congeniality years ago.)

As best as I can tell, such a three-day extension has never been offered in the past. (It will, I sincerely hope, never be offered in the future.) It was extended as a gesture of goodwill toward a minority within the church by someone, namely, the Presiding Bishop, who is supposed to be representing the whole church. The biggest problem with this gesture, beyond its being an abuse of authority, is that validating the election of a controversial bishop is something of a zero-sum game. The bishop-elect either becomes a bishop or not. A dispensation given to the bishop-elect’s supporters necessarily is a handicap imposed on the bishop-elect’s detractors. On what ethical basis can the Presiding Bishop choose to upset the impartiality of the consent process to favor one outcome over another? Episcopalians clearly favor a certain generosity toward those holding minority views, but our polity does not allow the minority to rule, nor should it.

Hypocrisy

We have been told over and over by Lawrence’s supporters that our church is filled with hypocrites. They claim that, when Gene Robinson was up for consecration, liberals argued that New Hampshire, like any diocese, had the right to the bishop of its choice. South Carolina, the argument goes, should benefit from the same argument. South Carolina’s Canon Theologian Kendall Harmon explained to the Washington Post, however, that liberals have a “double standard” and that “conservatives are not leaving, they’re being driven out of the Episcopal Church.” In fact, some liberal bishops bought the argument that, having voted for Gene Robinson, they had to vote for Mark Lawrence. Bishop John Chane was one of these, and this argument may go a long way toward explaining why bishops with jurisdiction gave Lawrence sufficient consents for consecration.

With all due respect to Bishop Chane, I have to say that the reciprocity argument is specious. In the same story in which Dr. Harmon was quoted, I made the slightly more complex argument that should have moved Bishop Chane and those arguing along the same lines as he: “A diocese has a right to the bishop of its choice, all things being equal. But all things weren’t equal,” I said. “Gene Robinson was not threatening to walk away from the Episcopal Church.”

The Real Problem

Thus, of course, we come to the real problem: Mark Lawrence, goaded by questions from the South Carolina diocese, suggested that he would welcome a separation of the Diocese of South Carolina from The Episcopal Church. When challenged on this, he offered a series of answers to questions of his own devising that did not at all clarify his position and perhaps made Episcopalians even more queasy about his becoming a bishop. The South Carolina Standing Committee later tried to reassure the church in a letter of its own, but that wasn’t very effective either. Why, people wondered, could Lawrence not simply say that he would not leave the church and would do everything in his power to keep South Carolina from doing so? As the consent period was coming to a close, Lawrence finally issued a statement that satisfied some that he was not a potential schismatic. I was unconvinced, but his statement was sufficient to cause some standing committees to change their votes. Lawrence never repudiated his earlier pronouncements, however.

Is this system crazy, or what?

The 120-day consent period is a holdover from an earlier age when communications were not what they are today. Probably, most standing committee members were aware of Mark Lawrence’s election within days, or perhaps even hours. Because of delays in sending out requests for consent, standing committees had nearly six months to consider Lawrence’s suitability. Admittedly, more and more data—one hesitates to use the term “information”—became available as time wore on, but we were presented with the curious situation in which Lawrence and his supporters tried repeatedly to formulate a statement that would satisfy skeptical standing committees without resorting to outright lies. How long does such a process really need to go on? Does anyone who says something outrageous and requires six months to correct his mistake deserve our trust as an Episcopal bishop? Don’t we want bishops who are a little quicker on their feet?

The 120-day consent period should be shortened. It is unnecessary and, in the case of a controversial election, can lead to the painful spectacle we have just witnessed. The period should be cut in half, and standing committees should be allowed to vote only once. If we want to have bishops, let’s have a process that lets us get them faster.

Maybe Not Relieved

In my press release about the outcome of the South Carolina consent process, I said, “I’m sure that most Episcopalians that have been following the quest for consent to consecrate Fr. Lawrence are relieved to know that he will not now become a bishop.” There was, no doubt, some relief that an ugly season in the history of the church was over, but hardly anyone, even standing committee members who voted against giving consent, has been willing to express anything but sadness over the Lawrence affair. Even I find myself not especially cheered by Lawrence’s failure to be made a bishop and not particularly tempted to indulge in schadenfreude. I am gratified, however, in a way that perhaps only a loyal Episcopalian in an ultraconservative diocese like Pittsburgh or Fort Worth or San Joaquin or South Carolina can be. We have seen the narrow intolerance of Episcopal bishops harboring a deep loathing for The Episcopal Church, and we are relieved that our church has chosen not to add to their number. Episcopalians in healthier dioceses still do not fully appreciate the malignancy that threatens our church.

Lawrence Bid Fails

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori delivered the news to the Diocese of South Carolina this afternoon that its bishop-elect, the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence, has failed to receive sufficient consents for consecration. Some of the consents received from diocesan standing committees, apparently, were technically defective, leaving fewer than the required 56 valid consents. I, for one, am eagerly awaiting an ENS story that may clarify matters. For now, I have only seen a statement on the Diocese of South Carolina’s Web site announcing (from its point of view) the bad news. Because of my involvement in the campaign to prevent Fr. Lawrence’s consecration, I sent out a press release, which you can read here. I may have more to say when more information about the consent process becomes available.

And the correct date is …, Part II

On March 12, Louie Crew provided something of an explanation for the confusion about the deadline date for sending of consents from standing committees for the consecration of the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence as Bishop of South Carolina. (See my earlier post “And the correct date is ….”) He wrote:

I called the Office of the Presiding Bishop this morning for clarification about the deadlines for consents for Mark Lawrence as Bishop of South Carolina. TEC’s canons specify that the Presiding Bishop must confirm the authenticity of all balloting, not just the balloting of bishops.

March 9th would have been the deadline, but 3 days have been added for a grace period. The Presiding Bishop consulted David Beers, her chancellor, as well as the parliamentarian of the House of Bishops. Therefore all consents must be postmarked by today, March 12th. By this evening the Standing Committee of South Carolina will FedEx to the PB’s Office for verification all of the consent forms which they have received.

Also a Standing Committee which has yet to file consent may notify the Standing Committee of South Carolina by email today that such a consent is in the mails. Paper copies of all consents must be in the PB’s office before any announcement may be made. Consent requires the majority of all members of the Standing Committee, not just a majority of all members present at a particular meeting.

Thanks to Carl Gerdau, Canon to the Presiding Bishop, for walking me through these details.

Louie
Newark deputy

Well, as it happens, I was looking into the matter at the same time Louie was. My own investigations came to similar, though not always identical conclusions. I did not learn everything I—and, I’m sure, others—might want to know. What I did learn is that the Presiding Bishop’s Chancellor, David Booth Beers, who acted in the same capacity for previous Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, takes responsibility for the “grace period.” It was either first suggested by or somehow endorsed by the House of Bishops’ Parliamentarian, the Rt. Rev. John Clark Buchanan. I have not been able to identify the role played by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori in allowing South Carolina three extra days, but she clearly could overrule a decision of her Chancellor if she so desired. Beers held a briefing on the three-day extension at the Episcopal Church Center in New York sometime in February, and I have not been able to determine that any other bishop-elect has been granted the dispensation of a “grace period.”

Significance and Rationale

The effect of the three-day grace period applied to the consent process for Mark Lawrence may, in the end, make the difference between Lawrence’s becoming a bishop or not. One hundred twenty days after the Diocese of South Carolina sent its requests for content to consecrate Lawrence, that is, on March 9, insufficient consents were in hand and none appeared to be in transit. After the extended deadline, that is, at midnight on March 12, 55 of the necessary 56 consents were said to have been received. Nearly four days later, the South Carolina Standing Committee has had nothing more to say, and Episcopalians are still wondering whether Lawrence’s consecration has been, according to any set of rules, consented to. Like a close civil election, Lawrence’s fate may not be known for some time, since every vote is important. I have been warned not to anticipate the ultimate result based on the timing of its announcement. The Presiding Bishop’s office may insist on announcing a definitive tally of consents when it makes its announcement, which could occasion a delay even if Mark Lawrence’s failure to attract the required consents is already apparent. Everyone, for the moment, simply has to wait.

Whatever the outcome of the current voting, the church should look carefully at the idea of the three-day grace period. I find little canonical support for it. The consent process is described in Canon III.11.4(a), which reads, in part:

If the date of the election of a Bishop occurs more than one hundred and twenty days before the meeting of the General Convention, The Standing Committee of the Diocese for which the Bishop has been elected shall by its President, or by some person or persons specially appointed, immediately send to the Presiding Bishop and to the Standing Committees of the several Dioceses a certificate of the election by the Secretary of Convention of the Diocese, bearing a statement that evidence of the Bishop-elect’s having been duly ordered Deacon and Priest as to the Bishop-elect’s medical, psychological and psychiatric examination required in Sec. 3(b) of this Canon have been received and that a testimonial signed by a constitutional majority of the Convention must also be delivered in the following form: …

The Presiding Bishop, without delay, shall notify every Bishop of this Church exercising jurisdiction of the Presiding Bishop’s receipt of the certificates mentioned in this Section and request a statement of consent or withholding of consent. Each Standing Committee, in not more than one hundred and twenty days after the sending by the electing body of the certificate of the election, shall respond by sending the Standing Committee of the Diocese for which the Bishop is elected either the testimonial of consent in the form set out in paragraph (b) of this Section or written notice of its refusal to give consent. If a majority of the Standing Committees of all the Dioceses consents to the ordination of the Bishop-elect, the Standing Committee of the Diocese for which the Bishop is elected shall then forward the evidence of the consent, with the other necessary documents described in Sec. 3(a) of this Canon, to the Presiding Bishop. If the Presiding Bishop receives sufficient statements to indicate a majority of those Bishops consents to the ordination, the Presiding Bishop shall, without delay, notify the Standing Committee of the Diocese for which the Bishop is elected and the Bishop-elect of the consent.

(This is taken from the 2006 version of the canons. The 2003 version differs in no substantial way.) Notice that standing committees are to act “in not more than one hundred and twenty days after the sending by the electing body of the certificate of the election” (emphasis added). In other words, the 120-day clock starts running when the requests for consent are sent, irrespective of when they are received. (Notice, by the way, that requests for consents were sent nearly two months after the episcopal election. This, apparently, is typical, as there is a lot of work to do to assemble the necessary paperwork.) The wording of the canon is, no doubt, intended to make the starting date fixed and unambiguous. For complete transparency, the electing diocese should be required to declare publicly when the requests were sent, but the canon does not include this requirement. Because standing committees have 120 days to “respond by sending” the result of their deliberations, those responses must be given a few days to arrive, but it is not the time allowed for receiving consents, but the time allowed for deciding them to which the “grace period” is being applied. The passage above suggests no way that 120 days can become 123 days, and, as far as I know, no one other than the General Convention—this certainly includes the Presiding Bishop’s Chancellor—is authorized to modify a canon.

It has been argued, on the other hand, that Canon III.11.5 does offer enough wiggle room to justify the three-day grace period:

In case a majority of all the Standing Committees of the Dioceses do not consent to the ordination of the Bishop-elect within one hundred and twenty days from the date of the notification of the election by the Standing Committee of the Diocese for which the Bishop was elected, or in case a majority of all the Bishops exercising jurisdiction do not consent within one hundred and twenty days from the date of notification to them by the Presiding Bishop of the election, the Presiding Bishop shall declare the election null and void and shall give notice to the Standing Committee of the Diocese for which the Bishop was elected and to the Bishop-elect. The Convention of the Diocese may then proceed to a new election.

Some see ambiguity in “the date of the notification of the election by the Standing Committee.” What date is that? Is this the date referred to in the previous passage on which takes place “the sending by the electing body of the certificate of the election”? One would think so, but then there is that word “notification.” If one sends a message, can it be a “notification” before the recipient receives it? (If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it … oh, never mind.) If one’s answer is no, then notification takes place on a number of different days, i.e., on days on which the various standing committees receive the notification. Moreover, since some dioceses are overseas, a mailed notice may not arrive for many days, certainly more than three. One could further inquire as to whether one is notified once the request for consent is received, but before anyone opens the envelope. These musings only complicate what seems to be a rather straightforward matter. I believe that the only reasonable interpretation of Section 5 is that the “date of notification” is simply the date on which the Standing Committee of the the electing diocese sends its requests for consent. I believe the writers of Canon III.11 meant to be quite specific about the time frame for response, and it is perverse to suggest that any ambiguity in Section 5 is intended to override the specificity in Section 4(a), particularly because that ambiguity, if taken seriously, could lead to substantial variability in opinions about the date by which a standing committee should respond. (Should every standing committee have a different response date, based on when the request for consent is received? I think not.)

An Evaluation

It has been said that the three-day “grace period” is exactly that, a gift freely given by the church to a diocese. I have several problems with this notion. First, it is not clear that anyone is authorized to offer “grace” in this particular situation, and I personally believe that doing so is a canonical violation. In the situation in question, one must acknowledge that two positions, rather evenly matched, it would seem, are vying to be heard, and is not “grace” extended to one party an unearned impediment imposed on the other?

The three-day extension was imposed in a very manipulative manner. Even the South Carolina Standing Committee did not know of it until the 120 days had nearly expired. Apparently, this was to avoid encouraging the sloth of standing committees who, it was thought, had trouble making a decision in approximately six months! (I discovered early on that standing committees, long before requests for consent were sent, were already discussing whether consent should be given to consecrate Mark Lawrence.) Just when everyone thought the time for consent was over, the goal posts were moved, to the delight of some and the dismay of others.

Will such grace be offered in the future as a matter of course, or is it only for special cases? If a diocese elects a partnered lesbian priest bishop, for example, will an extra three days be allowed for sending consents. Or, since everyone now knows that “one hundred and twenty days” is really “one hundred and twenty-three days,” will we have to add six days next time, since the element of surprise is now forever lost?

I do not like to see our church playing fast and loose with its canons. If our church leaders do not appear to respect the letter of the law, what moral authority does anyone have to complain about the flagrant canonical violations we have seen from the “traditionalist” insurgents within our church, and what credibility do we have with our brothers and sisters in other provinces of the Anglican Communion? Is this “grace,” or are we ceding the high moral ground?

Three days over a period of four months, it might be argued, is a small thing. The extension became known at the very end of those four months, however, when the traditionalist Web site Stand Firm was encouraging, with some success, an effort to change standing committee votes. Adding three days would have seemed fairer—if not more canonical—had everyone been aware of the rules from the beginning.

It will be a constitutional tragedy if Mark Lawrence becomes a bishop only because he was allowed a special dispensation in the consent process. I pray that that does not come to pass, as it is not clear how The Episcopal Church would recover from it.

Whatever happens, the Presiding Bishop should assure the church that no such extra-canonical extension will ever be granted again, and she should appoint a small committee to review Canon III.11 with a view toward making any time limits totally unambiguous. In fact—as one who has read more of our church’s canon law that I would like to admit—I would support formation of a committee whose job it was to read through every line of our constitution and canons with the intention of suggesting changes to the General Convention to eliminate vagueness and ambiguity with “fixing” anything else. It is not surprising that the legislative process of the General Convention does not always produce clear, logical, unambiguous text. There is no reason, however, why it should not clean up after itself.