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.
March 31, 2007
March 30, 2007
“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.
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.
March 18, 2007
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:
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):
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.
“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:Adequate Consents or Not?
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) _______________
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.
March 15, 2007
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.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.”
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
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: …(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.
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.
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.
March 14, 2007
Some Mathematical Reflections on Communion
Mark Harris wrote a post on his blog the other day about Bishop David Bena’s recent move from The Episcopal Church to the Convocation for Anglicans in North America (CANA). Bishop Bena is recently retired from the ultraconservative Diocese of Albany. CANA is claimed by the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) to be “a mission of the Church of Nigeria.” Mark raises various questions about who is in communion with whom and what is the nature of the “transfer” that has taken place. When I read Mark’s post, it had already attracted 23 comments from visitors, and it is probably fair to say that all this analysis has raised rather more questions than it has answered.
Let me assure you at the outset that I do not have the answers that would clarify all the issues involved. The situation makes it clear that the informality of the Anglican Communion can be something of a problem in unfamiliar and challenging circumstances. Although I am not enthusiastic about any proposal for an Anglican covenant—the much talked about idea is really intended as a mechanism to keep The Episcopal Church out of the twenty-first century—some agreement that spelled out how the Anglican Communion is supposed to work could actually be helpful if it avoided anything touching upon doctrine.
Even before the 2003 General Convention voted to consecrate Gene Robinson, there was some doubt about what churches were in communion with what other churches, since the ordination of women had already put strains on our Anglican fellowship. It is becoming increasingly clear that “being in communion” does not have a simple, universally accepted meaning, and, in practice, the concept does not always imply what we might expect. What is required for one church to be in communion with another?
Consider a particular case. The Episcopal and Nigerian churches are in the Anglican Communion and in communion with Canterbury, which might lead one to think that they should be in communion with one another. Nigeria claims not to be in communion with The Episcopal Church, however, which, as far as I can tell, has not declared itself out of communion with the Church of Nigeria. This could have the consequence—I cannot say whether it actually does—that a bishop could transfer “lawfully” from The Episcopal Church to the Church of Nigeria but could not transfer back. (Since, of course, the Anglican Communion really has no enforcement mechanism, anyone can get away with anything that doesn’t cause too much commotion.) This is, of course, goofy. It’s certainly goofy if it’s true, and it’s also goofy that we don’t know whether it’s true or not! Of course, it may be that the Episcopal/Nigerian church relationship cannot be what the Nigerians say it is.
As a mathematician, I find it impossible not to view the matter of communion in terms of relations. A mathematical relation is a formal description that is used to capture and reason about relationships between objects. For example, “equality” is a relation defined on, to keep matters simple, integers. If x and y represent arbitrary integers, we write x = y, meaning that x and y have the same value. In our case, our variables represent churches, and we can define a relation C such that x C y means that church x is in communion with church y. Mathematically, C is given by a set of ordered pairs, such that, (x, y) is contained in the set C if and only if x C y.
The eyes of most readers are, most likely, glazed over by now, but there is a point to this. Relations provide a useful set of named concepts and operations that allow efficient discussion of relationships like “being in communion with.” Whatever this relationship is in practice, it surely involves rules about exchange of clergy and allowing members of the related churches to take communion in one another’s houses of worship. (More definition on the part of the Anglican Communion would likely be helpful.) Now we get mathematical, but only trivially so. We can say that, for any church x, x C x. That is, every church is in communion with itself. This provides no big insight, but it shows that C is, as a mathematician would say, reflexive.
Now for a more interesting mathematical question: is the relation C symmetric? If x C y, is, necessarily, y C x? If being in communion is reciprocal, then the relation should be symmetric. Is it not crazy to suggest that we can be in communion with the Church of Nigeria, but the Church of Nigeria is not in communion with The Episcopal Church? Several observations are in order here. First, how does one “break communion,” i.e., how does church x, in communion with church y, change x C y to not x C y? The answer to this is something else that might go into the aforementioned Anglican covenant. I won’t deal with it here, but I will offer the thought that C should be symmetric because it borders on nonsensical for it not to be. If we all agreed that “being in communion with” is a symmetric relation, then, if the Church of Nigeria declares itself to be out of communion with us in some effective way—whatever that may mean—we do not have to declare what some would think uncharitable, namely, that The Episcopal Church is not in communion with the Church of Nigeria. Instead, our not being in communion with Nigeria would be automatic. Mathematically, C’s being symmetric means that, if (x, y) is not in the relation, then, necessarily, neither is (y, x).
One church in the Anglican Communion is special, namely, the Church of England, represented by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Peter Akinola, Archbishop of Nigeria, has suggested throwing the Church of England out of the Anglican Communion. This, however, is a nonsensical idea, as, at the very least, the Communion has always been seen as churches in communion with the Church of England. One imagines that the Church of England can no more be thrown out of the Anglican Communion than, say, the U.S. could be expelled from the nations of North America.
From this point on, we will consider the relation C defined only on churches of the Anglican Communion. Thus, we will not talk about, say, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The Episcopal Church is in communion with the Lutherans, but this relation may not be the same as the one we have designated by C. In any case, no one thinks the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is in the Anglican Communion, so no variable z that might be of interest can represent that church.
Now consider C defined for Anglican Communion members (or possible members). We see that one object (as the mathematicians would say) is special. It is called the Church of England, and we will represent it as e. Thus, we must have e C e. If the members of the Communion are necessarily churches with which the Archbishop of Canterbury is in communion, then, for any church x in the communion, we must have e C x. If we assume that C is symmetric, which surely seems reasonable, then we can also say that x C e.
Now, should not “being in communion with” within the Anglican Communion be transitive? That is, if x C y and y C z, then should we not be guaranteed that x C z? If C is transitive and symmetric, since every church in the Communion is in communion with the Church of England (and vice versa), then every church in the Communion is necessarily in communion with the other churches of the Communion. Surely this is as it should be.
Now, permit me to offer a definition of the members of the Anglican Communion. First, define the communion relationships of the Anglican Communion as the reflexive, symmetric, transitive closure of C. In other words, if we begin with e C x for each church x that Canterbury is in communion with, we get all of C by adding all ordered pairs needed to make C reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. Don’t worry about the mathematics; this effectively means that all churches in the communion are in communion with all other churches in the communion. As I said, this is clearly how things should be. Seemingly, however, it is not how things are, because, for example, the Church of Nigeria is not in communion with The Episcopal Church.
If you define the communion as I have suggested, however, what happens when the Church of Nigeria declares itself not in communion with our church? Mathematically, this is very simple. Let t represent The Episcopal Church and n represent the Church of Nigeria. Since it is now not the case that n C t, we cannot have t C n because, if we did, it would violate our symmetry requirement. Automatically, The Episcopal Church is not in communion with the Church of Nigeria, and we did not have to “declare” anything to make it so. By transitivity, however, since t C e and e C n, transitivity would imply that t C n. Since this is not in the relation—I’ll skip a logically rigorous argument here—either t or n must never appear in one of our ordered pairs. It would be perverse to suggest that one church that is not the Church of England could unilaterally throw another church out of the Communion, so we must conclude that, if Nigeria breaks communion with The Episcopal Church, the only way to maintain the definition of the Communion is to conclude that Nigeria breaks all relationships with all other Communion churches. In other words, it removes itself from the communion.
Well, admittedly, that was a roundabout way of getting where I finally ended up, but I really do like my mathematical definition of the Communion. After all, an Anglican Communion out of communion with itself just makes no sense. For that part of the Communion that yearns for “clarity” and “unity,” my definition delivers.
Let me assure you at the outset that I do not have the answers that would clarify all the issues involved. The situation makes it clear that the informality of the Anglican Communion can be something of a problem in unfamiliar and challenging circumstances. Although I am not enthusiastic about any proposal for an Anglican covenant—the much talked about idea is really intended as a mechanism to keep The Episcopal Church out of the twenty-first century—some agreement that spelled out how the Anglican Communion is supposed to work could actually be helpful if it avoided anything touching upon doctrine.
Even before the 2003 General Convention voted to consecrate Gene Robinson, there was some doubt about what churches were in communion with what other churches, since the ordination of women had already put strains on our Anglican fellowship. It is becoming increasingly clear that “being in communion” does not have a simple, universally accepted meaning, and, in practice, the concept does not always imply what we might expect. What is required for one church to be in communion with another?
Consider a particular case. The Episcopal and Nigerian churches are in the Anglican Communion and in communion with Canterbury, which might lead one to think that they should be in communion with one another. Nigeria claims not to be in communion with The Episcopal Church, however, which, as far as I can tell, has not declared itself out of communion with the Church of Nigeria. This could have the consequence—I cannot say whether it actually does—that a bishop could transfer “lawfully” from The Episcopal Church to the Church of Nigeria but could not transfer back. (Since, of course, the Anglican Communion really has no enforcement mechanism, anyone can get away with anything that doesn’t cause too much commotion.) This is, of course, goofy. It’s certainly goofy if it’s true, and it’s also goofy that we don’t know whether it’s true or not! Of course, it may be that the Episcopal/Nigerian church relationship cannot be what the Nigerians say it is.
As a mathematician, I find it impossible not to view the matter of communion in terms of relations. A mathematical relation is a formal description that is used to capture and reason about relationships between objects. For example, “equality” is a relation defined on, to keep matters simple, integers. If x and y represent arbitrary integers, we write x = y, meaning that x and y have the same value. In our case, our variables represent churches, and we can define a relation C such that x C y means that church x is in communion with church y. Mathematically, C is given by a set of ordered pairs, such that, (x, y) is contained in the set C if and only if x C y.
The eyes of most readers are, most likely, glazed over by now, but there is a point to this. Relations provide a useful set of named concepts and operations that allow efficient discussion of relationships like “being in communion with.” Whatever this relationship is in practice, it surely involves rules about exchange of clergy and allowing members of the related churches to take communion in one another’s houses of worship. (More definition on the part of the Anglican Communion would likely be helpful.) Now we get mathematical, but only trivially so. We can say that, for any church x, x C x. That is, every church is in communion with itself. This provides no big insight, but it shows that C is, as a mathematician would say, reflexive.
Now for a more interesting mathematical question: is the relation C symmetric? If x C y, is, necessarily, y C x? If being in communion is reciprocal, then the relation should be symmetric. Is it not crazy to suggest that we can be in communion with the Church of Nigeria, but the Church of Nigeria is not in communion with The Episcopal Church? Several observations are in order here. First, how does one “break communion,” i.e., how does church x, in communion with church y, change x C y to not x C y? The answer to this is something else that might go into the aforementioned Anglican covenant. I won’t deal with it here, but I will offer the thought that C should be symmetric because it borders on nonsensical for it not to be. If we all agreed that “being in communion with” is a symmetric relation, then, if the Church of Nigeria declares itself to be out of communion with us in some effective way—whatever that may mean—we do not have to declare what some would think uncharitable, namely, that The Episcopal Church is not in communion with the Church of Nigeria. Instead, our not being in communion with Nigeria would be automatic. Mathematically, C’s being symmetric means that, if (x, y) is not in the relation, then, necessarily, neither is (y, x).
One church in the Anglican Communion is special, namely, the Church of England, represented by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Peter Akinola, Archbishop of Nigeria, has suggested throwing the Church of England out of the Anglican Communion. This, however, is a nonsensical idea, as, at the very least, the Communion has always been seen as churches in communion with the Church of England. One imagines that the Church of England can no more be thrown out of the Anglican Communion than, say, the U.S. could be expelled from the nations of North America.
From this point on, we will consider the relation C defined only on churches of the Anglican Communion. Thus, we will not talk about, say, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The Episcopal Church is in communion with the Lutherans, but this relation may not be the same as the one we have designated by C. In any case, no one thinks the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is in the Anglican Communion, so no variable z that might be of interest can represent that church.
Now consider C defined for Anglican Communion members (or possible members). We see that one object (as the mathematicians would say) is special. It is called the Church of England, and we will represent it as e. Thus, we must have e C e. If the members of the Communion are necessarily churches with which the Archbishop of Canterbury is in communion, then, for any church x in the communion, we must have e C x. If we assume that C is symmetric, which surely seems reasonable, then we can also say that x C e.
Now, should not “being in communion with” within the Anglican Communion be transitive? That is, if x C y and y C z, then should we not be guaranteed that x C z? If C is transitive and symmetric, since every church in the Communion is in communion with the Church of England (and vice versa), then every church in the Communion is necessarily in communion with the other churches of the Communion. Surely this is as it should be.
Now, permit me to offer a definition of the members of the Anglican Communion. First, define the communion relationships of the Anglican Communion as the reflexive, symmetric, transitive closure of C. In other words, if we begin with e C x for each church x that Canterbury is in communion with, we get all of C by adding all ordered pairs needed to make C reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. Don’t worry about the mathematics; this effectively means that all churches in the communion are in communion with all other churches in the communion. As I said, this is clearly how things should be. Seemingly, however, it is not how things are, because, for example, the Church of Nigeria is not in communion with The Episcopal Church.
If you define the communion as I have suggested, however, what happens when the Church of Nigeria declares itself not in communion with our church? Mathematically, this is very simple. Let t represent The Episcopal Church and n represent the Church of Nigeria. Since it is now not the case that n C t, we cannot have t C n because, if we did, it would violate our symmetry requirement. Automatically, The Episcopal Church is not in communion with the Church of Nigeria, and we did not have to “declare” anything to make it so. By transitivity, however, since t C e and e C n, transitivity would imply that t C n. Since this is not in the relation—I’ll skip a logically rigorous argument here—either t or n must never appear in one of our ordered pairs. It would be perverse to suggest that one church that is not the Church of England could unilaterally throw another church out of the Communion, so we must conclude that, if Nigeria breaks communion with The Episcopal Church, the only way to maintain the definition of the Communion is to conclude that Nigeria breaks all relationships with all other Communion churches. In other words, it removes itself from the communion.
Well, admittedly, that was a roundabout way of getting where I finally ended up, but I really do like my mathematical definition of the Communion. After all, an Anglican Communion out of communion with itself just makes no sense. For that part of the Communion that yearns for “clarity” and “unity,” my definition delivers.
March 8, 2007
Unconvinced
Yesterday, March 7, five days before the deadline for obtaining adequate consents from standing committees to make him a bishop, Mark Lawrence wrote a letter that attempts to reassure the church that he is not planning to leave it. The letter is prominently posted on the Diocese of South Carolina Web site. It is, in fact, on its home page, where no one can miss it, but where it surely cannot stay forever. Therefore, I will reproduce it here:
First, let’s look at the statement itself. Lawrence has said before that he will, as he puts it here, “make the vows” required by the church. Of course he will; it is required for consecration. The question has always been whether he will keep the vows he “makes.” He tells us that his “intention is to remain in The Episcopal Church.” This is not the same as saying that he will remain in The Episcopal Church, work for its unity, and resign as bishop and leave the church without prejudice should he, at some future time, not be able to keep the vows he has “made.”
Recall that Lawrence, answering a diocesan questionnaire (see my original essay, “No Consents: A Crucial Test for The Episcopal Church”) said that:
In his November 6, 2006, letter “clarifying” his opinions, for example—recall that he framed the questions in this letter, although they reflect what was being asked by bishops and standing committees—in answer to the question “What would be your response if the convention of the Diocese of South Carolina voted to leave The Episcopal Church?” he wrote the following:
I think that Mark Lawrence now believes that separating the Diocese of South Carolina from the rest of The Episcopal Church is, from his point of view, simply becoming unnecessary. What has changed? Quite simply, the communiqué from the latest meeting of the primates raises the hope that the Anglican Communion will extinguish liberal Christianity from The Episcopal Church and return our church to some mythical seventeenth-century “orthodoxy.” Sadly, he might be right. Diocesan standing committees, however, can help prevent such a disaster by refusing to change their decision to deny consent, by changing their decision to give consent, or, if they have not yet acted on the request for consent, by either denying the request or doing nothing.
Dear Standing Committees of The Episcopal Church,What are we to make of this declaration? It is, of course, a statement made under duress, but, for the sake of argument, I am willing to consider it an expression of a sincere intention. Should any minds be changed by it? No.
I have been told that some diocesan Standing Committees have graciously offered to reconsider their denial of consent to my election as the XIV Bishop of South Carolina, if they only have assurance of my intention to remain in The Episcopal Church. Although I previously provided assurance of my intention, this has not been sufficient for some Standing Committees, which are earnestly seeking to make a godly discernment. Therefore, taking to heart the apostolic admonition in 1 Timothy 3:2, “Now a bishop must be above reproach, …temperate [free from rashness], sensible, dignified, hospitable, an apt teacher….” I am reminded to make every attempt to reason with those who have denied consent or who have not yet voted. As I stated at the walkabout in Charleston on September 9, 2006 and again in a statement written on 6 November 2006, I will make the vows of conformity as written in the BCP and the Constitution & Canons, (III.11.8). I will heartily make the vows conforming “…to the doctrine, discipline, and worship” of the Episcopal Church, as well as the trustworthiness of the Holy Scriptures. So to put it as clearly as I can, my intention is to remain in The Episcopal Church.
Yours in Christ,
The Very Reverend Mark J. Lawrence
First, let’s look at the statement itself. Lawrence has said before that he will, as he puts it here, “make the vows” required by the church. Of course he will; it is required for consecration. The question has always been whether he will keep the vows he “makes.” He tells us that his “intention is to remain in The Episcopal Church.” This is not the same as saying that he will remain in The Episcopal Church, work for its unity, and resign as bishop and leave the church without prejudice should he, at some future time, not be able to keep the vows he has “made.”
Recall that Lawrence, answering a diocesan questionnaire (see my original essay, “No Consents: A Crucial Test for The Episcopal Church”) said that:
- The church should divide over the issue of homosexuality.
- He is unsure if he would resign his orders as an Episcopal priest “[i]f the Diocese of South Carolina does not [emphasis added] become separate in some formal way from ECUSA.”
- “If the Diocese of South Carolina separates in some formal way from ECUSA,” he would not transfer to an Episcopal diocese remaining in the church.
In his November 6, 2006, letter “clarifying” his opinions, for example—recall that he framed the questions in this letter, although they reflect what was being asked by bishops and standing committees—in answer to the question “What would be your response if the convention of the Diocese of South Carolina voted to leave The Episcopal Church?” he wrote the following:
I don’t think that speculative questions of this nature as to what a person will do in some imagined future are either reasonable or helpful. I mean no disrespect by this, but I will say in all fairness, I can think up many such questions of an imagined future crisis that could send any of us into a conundrum of canonical contradictions.Lawrence was not being forthcoming then, and he is only seeming to be forthcoming now.
I think that Mark Lawrence now believes that separating the Diocese of South Carolina from the rest of The Episcopal Church is, from his point of view, simply becoming unnecessary. What has changed? Quite simply, the communiqué from the latest meeting of the primates raises the hope that the Anglican Communion will extinguish liberal Christianity from The Episcopal Church and return our church to some mythical seventeenth-century “orthodoxy.” Sadly, he might be right. Diocesan standing committees, however, can help prevent such a disaster by refusing to change their decision to deny consent, by changing their decision to give consent, or, if they have not yet acted on the request for consent, by either denying the request or doing nothing.
March 7, 2007
Down to the Wire
About five days remain for the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence to collect consents from an additional 10 standing committees (at last public count, anyway) if he is to be consecrated the next Bishop of South Carolina. News stories are beginning to appear describing the canonical process that has become something of a cliffhanger. No special last-minute lobbying effort has been in evidence to encourage denial of consent, but the Web site Stand Firm (representing “Traditional Anglicanism in America,” according to its banner) is asking its readers to write to standing committees urging support for the consecration. Stand Firm, helpfully, even provides a sample letter. No doubt, some will view this activity as unseemly, but, if it does not exactly conform to Episcopal tradition, it surely is not prohibited and is in the finest American tradition of lobbying in support of one’s cause. It remains to be seen if it does bishop-elect Lawrence any good.
Today’s Associated Press story out of South Carolina provides little information for those who have been following this affair, but I was struck by this line: “Lawrence said Monday it was highly unusual for the consecration of a bishop to be blocked.” Indeed it is, having not occurred since 1934, when the General Convention denied consent for John Torok to become Bishop of Eau Claire. The last time a bishop-elect failed to gather the necessary consents from bishops with jurisdiction and standing committees—i.e., outside of the General Convention—was in 1875, when standing committees prevented James De Koven from becoming Bishop of Illinois. (De Koven fared badly in his efforts to become a bishop, having been rejected the previous year as Bishop of Wisconsin because of his “ritualist” views. Nonetheless, De Koven’s accomplishments were such that we celebrate his life—see Lesser Feasts and Fasts—on March 22.)
If no one elected bishop has been rejected by the wider church in nearly three-quarters of a century, the fault is not Mark Lawrence’s. His was a leading voice opposing Gene Robinson’s consecration at the 2003 General Convention. In fact, he was a signer of a minority report urging that Robinson be rejected as Bishop of New Hampshire:
Under the circumstances, it is impossible to argue that it is inappropriate to consider Lawrence’s fitness for office without, at the same time, indicting him for having done the same thing to others.
Today’s Associated Press story out of South Carolina provides little information for those who have been following this affair, but I was struck by this line: “Lawrence said Monday it was highly unusual for the consecration of a bishop to be blocked.” Indeed it is, having not occurred since 1934, when the General Convention denied consent for John Torok to become Bishop of Eau Claire. The last time a bishop-elect failed to gather the necessary consents from bishops with jurisdiction and standing committees—i.e., outside of the General Convention—was in 1875, when standing committees prevented James De Koven from becoming Bishop of Illinois. (De Koven fared badly in his efforts to become a bishop, having been rejected the previous year as Bishop of Wisconsin because of his “ritualist” views. Nonetheless, De Koven’s accomplishments were such that we celebrate his life—see Lesser Feasts and Fasts—on March 22.)
If no one elected bishop has been rejected by the wider church in nearly three-quarters of a century, the fault is not Mark Lawrence’s. His was a leading voice opposing Gene Robinson’s consecration at the 2003 General Convention. In fact, he was a signer of a minority report urging that Robinson be rejected as Bishop of New Hampshire:
Believing that the work of Legislative Committee 07: Consecration of Bishops is, according to the Title III, Canon 22, more than merely a verification of correct procedure, but is equally concerned with the appropriateness of the candidate’s wholesomeness of life (and consequently includes sexual behavior);One has to admit that that last paragraph was prophetic! Anyway, Lawrence played a similar role in 2006, being the author of a similar minority report opposing the consecration of Barry Beisner as Bishop of Northern California:
And that this wholesomeness is not merely a model for an individual diocese, but also for the entire One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church to which he would be ordained and consecrated;
And whereas the approval of a bishop elect who is in a same-sex relationship, even if monogamous and loving, is in opposition to the clear teaching of Holy Scripture, the historic teaching of the church, and the promulgated teaching of this Body of Christ known as the Episcopal Church by previous General Conventions;
And whereas the approval of a bishop in said lifestyle would become a pretext upon which the church would de facto resolve the question of the appropriateness of homosexual behavior without due reordering of the church’s teaching;
And whereas the approval of this consecration will bring profound consternation to many of our sisters and brothers at home and abroad, straining relationships within the Anglican Communion, and adversely affecting the mission and ministry of the church at home and abroad, the undersigned file this minority report and recommend rejection of C045.
Respectfully submitted,
(signed)
The Very Rev. Mark J. Lawrence
Anthony J. Clark
John E. Masters
Believing that the work of Legislative Committee 07: Consecration of Bishops is more than merely a verification of correct procedure, but is equally concerned with the appropriateness of the candidate’s wholesomeness of life; and that this wholesomeness of life is not merely a model for an individual diocese, but also for The Episcopal Church, there are some troubling impediments to granting consent for this election.
Therefore, we the undersigned are constrained to bring this matter before the House of Deputies at this 75th General Convention. All of these impediments are concerned with the fact that the Reverend Canon Barry L. Beisner is twice divorced and presently in his third marriage.
It must be stated clearly at the outset that we do not wish to impugn his present ministry in the diocese of Northern California , where he is obviously loved and appreciated. This was resoundingly expressed at the public hearing of our legislative committee meeting. We state even more emphatically that we do not wish to question God’s gracious forgiveness nor the sincerity of Canon Beisner’s repentance.
He has publicly acknowledged the wrongfulness of his prior actions and we affirm him in seeking God’s forgiveness of which we all stand in need. Indeed, we trust, as all Christians should, that Christ’s redeeming work is greater than any of our moral failures or mistakes.
Nevertheless, assurance of forgiveness does not determine the appropriateness of advancement to higher office. We are cognizant of the fact that the Episcopacy is the sacramental symbol of our unity with the apostles and the catholic Church throughout the world.
He or she represents the Church to the world as well as to the faithful. He must, as St. Paul states, “be above reproach” (1 Timothy 3:2). So, before this house proceeds with consenting to this election its members need to rightly weigh the following concerns:
- It is likely that the anomaly of a twice-divorced and thrice-married bishop may be broadly interpreted by the larger body of Christ, individual Christians, and even by peoples of goodwill in various non-Christian religions, that we in the Episcopal Church have weakened our teaching and commitment to the lifelong sanctity of marriage.
- It is likely in a time when so many in our nation are suffering because of the widespread fracturing of families, the approval of this election will send a confusing message to the members of our Church and to the unchurched in our communities. As the great Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple once stated, “The Church must be very clear in its public pronouncements so that she may be very pastoral in her application.”
- The consecration of a bishop is by its very nature a public teaching. Frankly, it is difficult to fully anticipate how the many divorced spouses within our church, as well as the traumatized children shuttled between one home and another, may interpret our consent to such a consecration.
- It is likely that it may further strain “the bonds of affection” within the Provinces of the Anglican Communion, causing them to question our commitment to the teaching of Holy Scripture, our marriage rite, our Canons and the resolutions of prior General Conventions regarding the sanctity of marriage (i.e., that we believe marriage to be “a lifelong commitment”).
- We are concerned that since the duties of a bishop require him or her to pass consent to those applying for permission to remarry after divorce, the bishop-elect’s prior marriages and divorces may hinder his ability to function in this capacity.
- It may also hinder his ability to exercise proper discipline and pastoral care for those priests or deacons and their spouses and families who are experiencing marital difficulties, estrangement, and divorce proceedings to say nothing of possible clergy persons’ applications for re-marriage.
- It needs to be considered that these prior marriages and divorces may provide far too much room for his conscience to be compromised by his prior failures and thus hindering the exercising of godly judgment towards those under his pastoral care. There is also the remote possibility of remaining woundedness from these failed marriages and that the stresses of the episcopacy are far too great and the risks far too significant.
In conclusion, it needs to be remembered that there are consequences to a person’s actions and that one is often required to live with these consequences. Forgiveness through Christ is sure. Nevertheless, one lives with the consequences. For this body of the Church catholic to attempt to disregard this truth is not only inappropriate, it puts the Church and her members in unnecessary compromise.
Finally, it needs to be noted that the above points are a compilation of concerns, and all are not necessarily held by every signatory of this report. We the undersigned respectfully file this minority report and suggest denial of the consent to this election, which is before you as D038.
The Very Rev. Mark J. Lawrence, San Joaquin
The Rev. Richmond Webster, Alabama
Alma Thompson Bell, Maryland
Christopher Hart, Pennsylvania
The Rev'd Hayden G. Crawford, Southwest Florida
The Rev. Richard S. Westbury, Jr., Florida
Under the circumstances, it is impossible to argue that it is inappropriate to consider Lawrence’s fitness for office without, at the same time, indicting him for having done the same thing to others.
March 4, 2007
And the correct date is …
According to an announcement reported yesterday from the Rev. J. Haden McCormick, president of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina, consents from other standing committees for the episcopal consecration of the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence must be “postmarked by March 12, 2007.” Episcopal News Service, in its February 16 story on McCormick’s request that standing committees that have refused to give consent reconsider their decision, gave March 9 as the deadline date, however: “In this case, the requests were mailed November 9, making the 120 day period end on March 9.” (Canon III.11.4(a) requires that standing committees respond within 120 days after requests for consent have been sent by the electing diocese’s standing committee.) So, which date is correct? One certainly hopes that South Carolina is not trying to move the goal posts because the requisite consents have not been forthcoming.
March 3, 2007
Can We Trust Our Bishops?
Probably not. That is, we likely cannot rely on the House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church to resist the demands of the Anglican primates, to which they have been instructed to respond by September 30. Will they act to protect our autonomy and vision, to “conform to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the Episcopal Church?” (BCP, p. 513) Without a good deal of lobbying by clergy, laypeople, and a few courageous bishops, don’t count on it.
Why am I so pessimistic? Because, in more than 30 years, our bishops have not dealt effectively with the growing, mostly neo-Puritan, insurgency in the church. Because there have been no presentments offered against bishops like Bob Duncan and Jack Iker, for whom vows and canons provide no restraints on their outrageous behavior. Because Presiding Bishops have repeatedly accepted the harsh judgments of the Primates’ Meeting without questioning the primates’ authority, their understanding of the Anglican Communion, or their mean-spirited reading of Scripture.
Mostly, however, I am discouraged by the news that a majority of the bishops with jurisdiction—those who constitute the core of our House of Bishops—have voted their consent to the consecration of the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence as the next bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina. Lawrence has made ambiguous statements about whether he would seek to remove or accede to removing South Carolina from The Episcopal Church, and, long before the primates tried to implement a plan for actually doing so, he advocated that our church’s autonomy be surrendered to them. (See my essay, “No Consents: A Crucial Test for The Episcopal Church.”) Consecrating Lawrence will give him a vote in the House of Bishops, and that vote will certainly favor the primates’ plan for our church over our independence. Most diocesan bishops, apparently, see no threat in that prospect.
We now must pray that standing committees will prevent the House of Bishops from becoming ever more sympathetic, or tolerant, or simply perplexed by the power plays of the traditionalist insurgency. For the consecration of Lawrence to proceed lawfully, consents from a majority of diocesan standing committees must be received by March 9. At last report, mercifully, that vote was running against consecration. Arms of standing committee members will likely be twisted in the coming week, however, and much of that twisting will be done by bishops.
The church’s Executive Council is now meeting in Portland, Oregon. It is on Executive Council that the voices of clergy and laypeople can be heard at the highest levels of The Episcopal Church between meetings of the General Convention. The House of Bishops meets later this month. I pray that Executive Council will go on record as warning the bishops that they do not have the moral authority—technically, I suspect that they do have the legal authority—to make the declarations they have been asked to make. I also pray that Executive Council will express skepticism, at the very least, of the propriety, wisdom, and practicality of the “pastoral” scheme the primates are trying to impose on our church.
Can we trust Executive Council to support our church? We will soon know. If we cannot, the majority of Episcopalians should be considering what is going to be their next church, since the more than 200-year run of The Episcopal Church will be coming to an end. I doubt that, without substantial pressure from Executive Council and from pulpit and pew, our bishops will resist the will of the primates and the insurgents in their midst.
Why am I so pessimistic? Because, in more than 30 years, our bishops have not dealt effectively with the growing, mostly neo-Puritan, insurgency in the church. Because there have been no presentments offered against bishops like Bob Duncan and Jack Iker, for whom vows and canons provide no restraints on their outrageous behavior. Because Presiding Bishops have repeatedly accepted the harsh judgments of the Primates’ Meeting without questioning the primates’ authority, their understanding of the Anglican Communion, or their mean-spirited reading of Scripture.
Mostly, however, I am discouraged by the news that a majority of the bishops with jurisdiction—those who constitute the core of our House of Bishops—have voted their consent to the consecration of the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence as the next bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina. Lawrence has made ambiguous statements about whether he would seek to remove or accede to removing South Carolina from The Episcopal Church, and, long before the primates tried to implement a plan for actually doing so, he advocated that our church’s autonomy be surrendered to them. (See my essay, “No Consents: A Crucial Test for The Episcopal Church.”) Consecrating Lawrence will give him a vote in the House of Bishops, and that vote will certainly favor the primates’ plan for our church over our independence. Most diocesan bishops, apparently, see no threat in that prospect.
We now must pray that standing committees will prevent the House of Bishops from becoming ever more sympathetic, or tolerant, or simply perplexed by the power plays of the traditionalist insurgency. For the consecration of Lawrence to proceed lawfully, consents from a majority of diocesan standing committees must be received by March 9. At last report, mercifully, that vote was running against consecration. Arms of standing committee members will likely be twisted in the coming week, however, and much of that twisting will be done by bishops.
The church’s Executive Council is now meeting in Portland, Oregon. It is on Executive Council that the voices of clergy and laypeople can be heard at the highest levels of The Episcopal Church between meetings of the General Convention. The House of Bishops meets later this month. I pray that Executive Council will go on record as warning the bishops that they do not have the moral authority—technically, I suspect that they do have the legal authority—to make the declarations they have been asked to make. I also pray that Executive Council will express skepticism, at the very least, of the propriety, wisdom, and practicality of the “pastoral” scheme the primates are trying to impose on our church.
Can we trust Executive Council to support our church? We will soon know. If we cannot, the majority of Episcopalians should be considering what is going to be their next church, since the more than 200-year run of The Episcopal Church will be coming to an end. I doubt that, without substantial pressure from Executive Council and from pulpit and pew, our bishops will resist the will of the primates and the insurgents in their midst.
February 28, 2007
Arkansas’s
I just heard a story on NPR’s “All Things Considered” about a resolution that has been introduced in the Arkansas legislature asserting that the singular possessive of “Arkansas” should be rendered as “Arkansas’s,” not “Arkansas’.” Apparently, the AP stylebook advises the use of “Arkansas’,” and the state’s largest newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is strongly in favor of that usage.
Whereas I’m sure that many will think the resolution introduced by Representative Steve Harrelson (D) is frivolous, I don’t. Not only is Representative Harrelson correct, but his resolution might encourage people think more deeply about the logic of grammatical rules concerning possessives. This may not fulfill a major purpose of the Arkansas legislature, but grammar rules need all the publicity they can get!
The AP apparently subscribes to the simpleminded rule that words ending in “s” form the singular possessive with the addition of a simple apostrophe. Most people would, in fact, write “in Jesus’ name” and would pronounce “Jesus’” in exactly the same way as they pronounce “Jesus.” However, some people would always—and other people would sometimes—add an extra sibilant syllable at the end of “Jesus,” which would, if spelling is to reflect pronunciation, cause the phrase to be rendered “in Jesus’s name.” Actually, I suspect that the AP rule is wrong at least as often as it is right. Would anyone really write “the boss’ daughter” and pronounce “boss’” as they pronounce “boss”? One could, I suppose, write the phrase this way and still say boss-es, but this suggests that the apostrophe itself can represent a syllable.
This, of course, is the problem with “Arkansas’.” In this case, however, there is not even a single sibilant at the end of the word to suggest any sort of plural or possessive. People pronounce the name of the state ahr-kuhn-saw, and they naturally pronounce the singular possessive ahr-kuhn-sawz. Surely, the extra sibilant cannot come from the apostrophe, which, after all, is a symbol that generally indicates that something has been left out, not that something invisible has been sneaked in! That sibilant must correspond to an actual “s.” Therefore, the only reasonable spelling is “Arkansas’s.”
I hope the resolution passes.
Whereas I’m sure that many will think the resolution introduced by Representative Steve Harrelson (D) is frivolous, I don’t. Not only is Representative Harrelson correct, but his resolution might encourage people think more deeply about the logic of grammatical rules concerning possessives. This may not fulfill a major purpose of the Arkansas legislature, but grammar rules need all the publicity they can get!
The AP apparently subscribes to the simpleminded rule that words ending in “s” form the singular possessive with the addition of a simple apostrophe. Most people would, in fact, write “in Jesus’ name” and would pronounce “Jesus’” in exactly the same way as they pronounce “Jesus.” However, some people would always—and other people would sometimes—add an extra sibilant syllable at the end of “Jesus,” which would, if spelling is to reflect pronunciation, cause the phrase to be rendered “in Jesus’s name.” Actually, I suspect that the AP rule is wrong at least as often as it is right. Would anyone really write “the boss’ daughter” and pronounce “boss’” as they pronounce “boss”? One could, I suppose, write the phrase this way and still say boss-es, but this suggests that the apostrophe itself can represent a syllable.
This, of course, is the problem with “Arkansas’.” In this case, however, there is not even a single sibilant at the end of the word to suggest any sort of plural or possessive. People pronounce the name of the state ahr-kuhn-saw, and they naturally pronounce the singular possessive ahr-kuhn-sawz. Surely, the extra sibilant cannot come from the apostrophe, which, after all, is a symbol that generally indicates that something has been left out, not that something invisible has been sneaked in! That sibilant must correspond to an actual “s.” Therefore, the only reasonable spelling is “Arkansas’s.”
I hope the resolution passes.
Anglican Ambiguity
I was reading Jim Naughton's latest blog post this morning and thinking about the communiqués we have come to expect from meetings of the Anglican primates. Jim and Kendall Harmon have been debating the meaning of the latest such document coming out of Tanzania. Tellingly, Kendall sees a “clear meaning” in the primates’ request regarding same-sex blessings, and Jim sees ambiguity, probably intended ambiguity. Jim would like to have the Archbishop of Canterbury clarify the intention of the document regarding the point in question. This likely won’t happen, and probably shouldn’t happen, since we have no reason to consider Rowan Williams’ opinion definitive, given that the communiqué was the product of a group process that reflected, however imperfectly, the intentions of dozens of people.
Most readers would have to admit that the primates’ communiqués of recent years have embodied a good deal of ambiguity overall. Putting aside for a moment the question of whether this is a good or a bad thing in the abstract, I suggest that ambiguity is inevitable as long as the primates insist on issuing a single, unanimous opinion at the conclusion of each of their meetings.
The pressure for unanimity must be enormous, given that our presiding bishops have signed the statements emanating from Lambeth, Dromantine, and Dar es Salaam, even though each statement was critical of the actions of The Episcopal Church. Given the devastating criticism and draconian demands that some primates have found in these missives, we must conclude either that our presiding bishops are spineless representatives of our church who are indifferent as to its future, or that they have been willing, at some level, to endorse the consensus of these meetings because they were able to read a more benign and acceptable message in their closing statements.
Of course, the nature of the “endorsement” implied by signing a Primates’ Meeting communiqué is itself ambiguous. I argued that Katharine Jefferts Schori should not have signed a communiqué “contrary to the interests of The Episcopal Church”—I believe the latest communiqué should be so characterized—but perhaps she signed with the understanding that her church, and not its nominal leader, should respond to the declarations of the primates. Nonetheless, reports suggest that Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria withheld his signature in order to strengthen the criticism of and demands on the American church. Did our Presiding Bishop threaten to withhold her signature? If not, why not?
In general, meetings of the primates address a variety of topics, and, even if not all of these are as sensitive as those touching on human sexuality, diverse opinions among the participants can be expected. The latest communiqué, for example, has 37 numbered paragraphs, aside from the attached “schedule,” and it is reasonable to assume that discussion of most of the issues treated involved some amount of disagreement. Introduction of ambiguity, shading of meaning, and the occasional explicit admission of disagreement are all ways of achieving a document that all are willing to sign. If this is a defect in the process, it is an inevitable one, as long as a single, unanimous declaration is required.
Increasingly, the Primates’ Meeting looks like a legislative body. (That the Anglican provinces have never empowered it to be such is a serious matter I will not deal with here.) Surely it is what is described in Robert’s Rules as a “deliberative assembly,” operating, in some sense, like a town meeting, state legislature, or the U.S. Congress. Every student of such assemblies knows that, the longer and more complex a proposition to be voted on is, the more compromise is required for passage and the more compromised the “message” of the proposition becomes. Are we to assume that the primates are as united in their endorsement of a worldwide study of hermeneutics as they are in the view that The Episcopal Church “has departed from the standard of teaching on human sexuality accepted by the Communion in the 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10”? Probably not, but no insight into the relative consensus of diverse points is to be had in a document signed—endorsed in some ambiguous way—by all participants.
In the past, I have viewed Anglican ambiguity as a tool that helped keep Anglicans together, a way of minimizing our differences and allowing everyone to save face, to tolerate in others viewpoints and actions they might otherwise feel compelled to condemn. I am beginning to feel differently about Anglican ambiguity, however. Archbishop Rowan Williams, addressing the Church of England General Synod earlier this week, described the reactions of the primates to the response to their requests made last year by General Convention:
The angriest primates held out for treating The Episcopal Church harshly, demanding this as the price for achieving the “necessary” unanimity in the communiqué. More moderate voices were only able to accept this because of ambiguity in the document, both in its actual provisions and in the meaning that might be attached to a primate’s signature. Does our own Presiding Bishop approve of everything in the communiqué? Is she obliged to defend it to The Episcopal Church and to recommend that its provisions, in one form or another, be implemented? Who knows?
If the primates did not insist on everyone’s signing a final statement, Katharine Jefferts Schori could simply have said, “I will not sign.” The other primates could have accepted that—certainly an action the world at large would have understood—or they might have actually tried to accommodate her concerns so that she would sign. Better still, the primates could vote on individual provisions and, even if they did not announce the vote count, they could represent that, as a group, they endorsed certain positions. No recommendation (or demand) would thereby be foisted on the Communion by an actual minority of the primates. This would show clearly what the primates, collectively, support or do not support. Clarity, however, is not the Anglican way.
Of course, no one in full possession of his or her faculties believes either that every primate is 100% behind all the provisions of the Tanzania communiqué or that each primate understands it the same way. Beyond that, we know very little, however, and all sides are inclined to project their hopes and fears onto the necessarily ambiguous document, a process that fosters conflict, rather than reconciliation. The reality is that the process by which such statements are produced is fundamentally flawed, possibly dishonest, and is certainly driving the Communion to take more radical stands than it might in the absence of current constraints. Episcopalians, and Anglicans generally, for that matter, have little reason to put much faith in either the process for or products of the Primates’ Meeting. Given that the primates have no right to legislate or dictate to the various provinces anyway, that faith should be even further discounted.
Most readers would have to admit that the primates’ communiqués of recent years have embodied a good deal of ambiguity overall. Putting aside for a moment the question of whether this is a good or a bad thing in the abstract, I suggest that ambiguity is inevitable as long as the primates insist on issuing a single, unanimous opinion at the conclusion of each of their meetings.
The pressure for unanimity must be enormous, given that our presiding bishops have signed the statements emanating from Lambeth, Dromantine, and Dar es Salaam, even though each statement was critical of the actions of The Episcopal Church. Given the devastating criticism and draconian demands that some primates have found in these missives, we must conclude either that our presiding bishops are spineless representatives of our church who are indifferent as to its future, or that they have been willing, at some level, to endorse the consensus of these meetings because they were able to read a more benign and acceptable message in their closing statements.
Of course, the nature of the “endorsement” implied by signing a Primates’ Meeting communiqué is itself ambiguous. I argued that Katharine Jefferts Schori should not have signed a communiqué “contrary to the interests of The Episcopal Church”—I believe the latest communiqué should be so characterized—but perhaps she signed with the understanding that her church, and not its nominal leader, should respond to the declarations of the primates. Nonetheless, reports suggest that Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria withheld his signature in order to strengthen the criticism of and demands on the American church. Did our Presiding Bishop threaten to withhold her signature? If not, why not?
In general, meetings of the primates address a variety of topics, and, even if not all of these are as sensitive as those touching on human sexuality, diverse opinions among the participants can be expected. The latest communiqué, for example, has 37 numbered paragraphs, aside from the attached “schedule,” and it is reasonable to assume that discussion of most of the issues treated involved some amount of disagreement. Introduction of ambiguity, shading of meaning, and the occasional explicit admission of disagreement are all ways of achieving a document that all are willing to sign. If this is a defect in the process, it is an inevitable one, as long as a single, unanimous declaration is required.
Increasingly, the Primates’ Meeting looks like a legislative body. (That the Anglican provinces have never empowered it to be such is a serious matter I will not deal with here.) Surely it is what is described in Robert’s Rules as a “deliberative assembly,” operating, in some sense, like a town meeting, state legislature, or the U.S. Congress. Every student of such assemblies knows that, the longer and more complex a proposition to be voted on is, the more compromise is required for passage and the more compromised the “message” of the proposition becomes. Are we to assume that the primates are as united in their endorsement of a worldwide study of hermeneutics as they are in the view that The Episcopal Church “has departed from the standard of teaching on human sexuality accepted by the Communion in the 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10”? Probably not, but no insight into the relative consensus of diverse points is to be had in a document signed—endorsed in some ambiguous way—by all participants.
In the past, I have viewed Anglican ambiguity as a tool that helped keep Anglicans together, a way of minimizing our differences and allowing everyone to save face, to tolerate in others viewpoints and actions they might otherwise feel compelled to condemn. I am beginning to feel differently about Anglican ambiguity, however. Archbishop Rowan Williams, addressing the Church of England General Synod earlier this week, described the reactions of the primates to the response to their requests made last year by General Convention:
About eleven provinces were fairly satisfied; about eleven were totally dissatisfied. The rest displayed varying levels of optimism or pessimism, but were not eager to see this as a life and death issue for the Communion. Of those who took one or the other of the more pronounced view, several on both sides nonetheless expressed real exasperation that this question and the affairs of one province should be taking up energy to the near-exclusion of other matters.How did such a divided group of primates come to issue the severe communiqué that was released on February 19? Is our use of ambiguity beginning to work in ways that drive us apart? I think it is.
The angriest primates held out for treating The Episcopal Church harshly, demanding this as the price for achieving the “necessary” unanimity in the communiqué. More moderate voices were only able to accept this because of ambiguity in the document, both in its actual provisions and in the meaning that might be attached to a primate’s signature. Does our own Presiding Bishop approve of everything in the communiqué? Is she obliged to defend it to The Episcopal Church and to recommend that its provisions, in one form or another, be implemented? Who knows?
If the primates did not insist on everyone’s signing a final statement, Katharine Jefferts Schori could simply have said, “I will not sign.” The other primates could have accepted that—certainly an action the world at large would have understood—or they might have actually tried to accommodate her concerns so that she would sign. Better still, the primates could vote on individual provisions and, even if they did not announce the vote count, they could represent that, as a group, they endorsed certain positions. No recommendation (or demand) would thereby be foisted on the Communion by an actual minority of the primates. This would show clearly what the primates, collectively, support or do not support. Clarity, however, is not the Anglican way.
Of course, no one in full possession of his or her faculties believes either that every primate is 100% behind all the provisions of the Tanzania communiqué or that each primate understands it the same way. Beyond that, we know very little, however, and all sides are inclined to project their hopes and fears onto the necessarily ambiguous document, a process that fosters conflict, rather than reconciliation. The reality is that the process by which such statements are produced is fundamentally flawed, possibly dishonest, and is certainly driving the Communion to take more radical stands than it might in the absence of current constraints. Episcopalians, and Anglicans generally, for that matter, have little reason to put much faith in either the process for or products of the Primates’ Meeting. Given that the primates have no right to legislate or dictate to the various provinces anyway, that faith should be even further discounted.
February 22, 2007
Lambeth 1998 1.10
I have been feeling guilty for not having written more analysis of the communiqué that emerged from the primates’ meeting in Tanzania earlier this week. I have been reading gratefully analyses by others (e.g., Father Jake, Inclusive Church, Integrity, and Mark Harris), and particularly by some of our bishops (e.g., Mark Sisk, James Jelinek, and Marc Andrus). I feel completely overwhelmed by the list of blogs, press releases, and newspaper stories I want to read in the wake of the meeting of the primates.
I have, of course, read the communiqué and the report from the Covenant Design Group that was issued in the course of the meeting. It is fair to say that I am not happy with any of it, although I must admit, reluctantly, that it all could have been worse. (Of course, there are few times in life where we cannot make that statement!) We have, I think, reached a point where the response of The Episcopal Church will determine its trajectory and that of the Anglican Communion for decades, perhaps forever. Tempting as it is to do so at such a time, I have decided not simply to shoot from the hip. I need to reflect more on what has been demanded of us and on what is possible before saying much more.
I did participate in the writing of the 2/20/2007 press release for Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh, which some may find especially restrained. PEP and I are in the special position of being in a diocese that the primates are trying to “help,” although my parish and many others in the Diocese of Pittsburgh are looking only for help in escaping the misguided diocesan leadership we endure here.
My detailed analysis of the work done in Tanzania will have to wait, though it will be forthcoming eventually. For now, I will content myself with making some small observations on which I can later elaborate.
How could the Tanzania meeting have turned out as it did? Why is The Episcopal Church being scolded and disciplined like a disobedient puppy? One major reason is the elevation of a particular Lambeth Conference resolution to a status just above the Windsor Report and just below Scripture itself. Lambeth 1998 1.10 (or I.10, as originally rendered), “Human Sexuality,” with its infamous, if somewhat ambiguous, declaration of “homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture,” has become, in the communiqué and elsewhere, the “standard of teaching” of the Anglican Communion. “Resolution 1.10” occurs five times in the communiqué, and “standard of teaching” occurs six times!
Lambeth Conference resolutions have always been accorded serious consideration, of course, but the Conference has never been granted the power to enact canons for the Anglican provinces, nor have the primates been granted the power to enforce them, particularly in the obtrusive manner we see in the “Schedule” appended to the communiqué. I suspect that most of the bishops who voted for Lambeth 1998 1.10 did not believe that they were passing an inviolable “law” for all the provinces, although I do suspect that the American Anglican Council and its allies who lobbied for the resolution anticipated its use as a big stick in the future against The Episcopal Church.
There are many reasons why the Lambeth Conference is not a good legislative body for the Communion, even if one believes that such a body might be desirable. Most significantly, however, the gathering—it used to be referred to dismissively as a “tea party”—is attended only by bishops, and therefore lacks the perspective of priests, deacons, and, especially, laypeople. Although many in the communion would argue that teaching is a unique duty of bishops, this is clearly not the view in The Episcopal Church, in which bishops are selected more for their pastoral and administrative gifts than for their theological or scholarly ones, and all orders of ministers participate in making major, church-wide decisions.
Lambeth has a checkered record of legislative wisdom—of consistency, anyway—as can be seen in its pronouncements over the years on birth control or the ordination of women. Not only are the primates arrogating the power to enforce Lambeth resolutions, but, in the communiqué, they articulate the notion that “a change in the formal teaching of any one Province would indicate a departure from the standard upheld by the Communion as a whole” (¶11), hardly a idea supportive of the notion of Anglican diversity. There are many problems with such a statement, not the least of which is the matter of what constitutes a “formal teaching” of The Episcopal Church, which, frankly, is a fuzzy concept in a non-confessional church. Moreover, the position of the primates seems to be that no one can be right unless we’re all right; it’s fine to be wrong, as long as we’re all wrong together. (An aside: Did you know that the word “arrogate” is related to the word “arrogant”? Even without investigating etymology, one should be able to see the connection.)
The notion that Lambeth 1998 1.10 is some kind of official “teaching” or manditory canon of the Communion has been especially pernicious, particularly when combined with the concept that the Anglican primates have powers over the Anglican provinces beyond anything officially granted to them, simply because these princes of the church have assumed them. (Americans used to call this “tyranny,” but, in recent days, we seem to have gotten used to it.) Whatever the response of The Episcopal Church is to be to the demands emanating from the Tanzania meeting, the church should dispute aggressively the whole notion that Lambeth resolutions are, in any sense, mandatory.
Actually, Lambeth 1998 1.10 goes no further than saying that the Conference “cannot advise the legitimising or blessing of same sex unions nor ordaining those involved in same gender unions.” The phrase “cannot advise,” however one imagines the Anglican Communion should operate, hardly seems an adequate mandate to threaten The Episcopal Church with expulsion and destruction of its autonomy for having declared, for example, “[t]hat we recognize that local faith communities are operating within the bounds of our common life as they explore and experience liturgies celebrating and blessing same-sex unions.” Not even the General Convention has actually “advised” the blessing of same-sex unions.
Just as aggressively, we should dispute the proposition that the primates have any substantive power over The Episcopal Church or any other Anglican province. Perhaps, given their arrogant behavior, we should dispute that they have any moral authority, either.
I have, of course, read the communiqué and the report from the Covenant Design Group that was issued in the course of the meeting. It is fair to say that I am not happy with any of it, although I must admit, reluctantly, that it all could have been worse. (Of course, there are few times in life where we cannot make that statement!) We have, I think, reached a point where the response of The Episcopal Church will determine its trajectory and that of the Anglican Communion for decades, perhaps forever. Tempting as it is to do so at such a time, I have decided not simply to shoot from the hip. I need to reflect more on what has been demanded of us and on what is possible before saying much more.
I did participate in the writing of the 2/20/2007 press release for Progressive Episcopalians of Pittsburgh, which some may find especially restrained. PEP and I are in the special position of being in a diocese that the primates are trying to “help,” although my parish and many others in the Diocese of Pittsburgh are looking only for help in escaping the misguided diocesan leadership we endure here.
My detailed analysis of the work done in Tanzania will have to wait, though it will be forthcoming eventually. For now, I will content myself with making some small observations on which I can later elaborate.
How could the Tanzania meeting have turned out as it did? Why is The Episcopal Church being scolded and disciplined like a disobedient puppy? One major reason is the elevation of a particular Lambeth Conference resolution to a status just above the Windsor Report and just below Scripture itself. Lambeth 1998 1.10 (or I.10, as originally rendered), “Human Sexuality,” with its infamous, if somewhat ambiguous, declaration of “homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture,” has become, in the communiqué and elsewhere, the “standard of teaching” of the Anglican Communion. “Resolution 1.10” occurs five times in the communiqué, and “standard of teaching” occurs six times!
Lambeth Conference resolutions have always been accorded serious consideration, of course, but the Conference has never been granted the power to enact canons for the Anglican provinces, nor have the primates been granted the power to enforce them, particularly in the obtrusive manner we see in the “Schedule” appended to the communiqué. I suspect that most of the bishops who voted for Lambeth 1998 1.10 did not believe that they were passing an inviolable “law” for all the provinces, although I do suspect that the American Anglican Council and its allies who lobbied for the resolution anticipated its use as a big stick in the future against The Episcopal Church.
There are many reasons why the Lambeth Conference is not a good legislative body for the Communion, even if one believes that such a body might be desirable. Most significantly, however, the gathering—it used to be referred to dismissively as a “tea party”—is attended only by bishops, and therefore lacks the perspective of priests, deacons, and, especially, laypeople. Although many in the communion would argue that teaching is a unique duty of bishops, this is clearly not the view in The Episcopal Church, in which bishops are selected more for their pastoral and administrative gifts than for their theological or scholarly ones, and all orders of ministers participate in making major, church-wide decisions.
Lambeth has a checkered record of legislative wisdom—of consistency, anyway—as can be seen in its pronouncements over the years on birth control or the ordination of women. Not only are the primates arrogating the power to enforce Lambeth resolutions, but, in the communiqué, they articulate the notion that “a change in the formal teaching of any one Province would indicate a departure from the standard upheld by the Communion as a whole” (¶11), hardly a idea supportive of the notion of Anglican diversity. There are many problems with such a statement, not the least of which is the matter of what constitutes a “formal teaching” of The Episcopal Church, which, frankly, is a fuzzy concept in a non-confessional church. Moreover, the position of the primates seems to be that no one can be right unless we’re all right; it’s fine to be wrong, as long as we’re all wrong together. (An aside: Did you know that the word “arrogate” is related to the word “arrogant”? Even without investigating etymology, one should be able to see the connection.)
The notion that Lambeth 1998 1.10 is some kind of official “teaching” or manditory canon of the Communion has been especially pernicious, particularly when combined with the concept that the Anglican primates have powers over the Anglican provinces beyond anything officially granted to them, simply because these princes of the church have assumed them. (Americans used to call this “tyranny,” but, in recent days, we seem to have gotten used to it.) Whatever the response of The Episcopal Church is to be to the demands emanating from the Tanzania meeting, the church should dispute aggressively the whole notion that Lambeth resolutions are, in any sense, mandatory.
Actually, Lambeth 1998 1.10 goes no further than saying that the Conference “cannot advise the legitimising or blessing of same sex unions nor ordaining those involved in same gender unions.” The phrase “cannot advise,” however one imagines the Anglican Communion should operate, hardly seems an adequate mandate to threaten The Episcopal Church with expulsion and destruction of its autonomy for having declared, for example, “[t]hat we recognize that local faith communities are operating within the bounds of our common life as they explore and experience liturgies celebrating and blessing same-sex unions.” Not even the General Convention has actually “advised” the blessing of same-sex unions.
Just as aggressively, we should dispute the proposition that the primates have any substantive power over The Episcopal Church or any other Anglican province. Perhaps, given their arrogant behavior, we should dispute that they have any moral authority, either.
February 20, 2007
A New Urgency
The question of consents for Mark Lawrence’s consecration pretty much dropped off The Episcopal Church radar screen for the past week or so. The primates’ meeting that concluded yesterday in Tanzania, however, has provided a new incentive to say “no” to the San Joaquin priest who would be Bishop of South Carolina. (See my last two posts, “The Consents Question, Again” and “Last Minute Thoughts on Consents.”)
According to “The Key Recommendations of the Primates,” released along with the final communiqué, the primates demand—the document uses the word “request,” but it is quite clear that a failure to accede to the “request” will lead to some sort of banishment from the Communion—that the bishops promise not to authorize rites for same-sex blessings in their dioceses or through the General Convention and that they assure the primates that resolution B033, passed at the 2006 General Convention, means that no partnered gay episcopal candidate will receive consents for consecration. This is perhaps not the worst insult to the polity of The Episcopal Church from the communiqué and from the proposed Anglican covenant, but it is particularly relevant to the consecration of Mark Lawrence.
The primates expect the House of Bishops to submit to their demands at the September 2007 meeting of the House of Bishops. Should Lawrence be consecrated in South Carolina, he will be a member of the House at that meeting and can influence what the bishops do. In his June 11, 2006, essay “A Prognosis for this Body Episcopal” in The Living Church, Lawrence blasted the democratic and autonomous polity of The Episcopal Church. His prescription was to turn over control of the church to the primates. “Surrender of the Episcopal Church’s autonomy is an admittedly radical suggestion,” he modestly observes, “but we are in need of lifesaving action.”
All standing committees and bishops with jurisdiction should know that granting consent for the consecration of Mark Lawrence is voting to implement his (and the primates) radical plan to emasculate The Episcopal Church.
According to “The Key Recommendations of the Primates,” released along with the final communiqué, the primates demand—the document uses the word “request,” but it is quite clear that a failure to accede to the “request” will lead to some sort of banishment from the Communion—that the bishops promise not to authorize rites for same-sex blessings in their dioceses or through the General Convention and that they assure the primates that resolution B033, passed at the 2006 General Convention, means that no partnered gay episcopal candidate will receive consents for consecration. This is perhaps not the worst insult to the polity of The Episcopal Church from the communiqué and from the proposed Anglican covenant, but it is particularly relevant to the consecration of Mark Lawrence.
The primates expect the House of Bishops to submit to their demands at the September 2007 meeting of the House of Bishops. Should Lawrence be consecrated in South Carolina, he will be a member of the House at that meeting and can influence what the bishops do. In his June 11, 2006, essay “A Prognosis for this Body Episcopal” in The Living Church, Lawrence blasted the democratic and autonomous polity of The Episcopal Church. His prescription was to turn over control of the church to the primates. “Surrender of the Episcopal Church’s autonomy is an admittedly radical suggestion,” he modestly observes, “but we are in need of lifesaving action.”
All standing committees and bishops with jurisdiction should know that granting consent for the consecration of Mark Lawrence is voting to implement his (and the primates) radical plan to emasculate The Episcopal Church.
February 18, 2007
Last Minute Thoughts on Consents
It was with a great sense of relief last night that I posted my essay on the recent letter from the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina, “The Consents Question, Again.” I spent a long time writing the post, mostly because I had to track down so much material on the Web for the “Background” section. After making some minor edits to correct problems found by a couple of friends, I’m going to leave the post alone, but I do have a couple of thoughts I want to add.
The South Carolinians asked that standing committees that have voted to withhold consent for Mark Lawrence’s consecration reconsider their vote. I suggest that standing committees that have given consent also reconsider. Resistance to granting consent is clearly strong, a fact that should give standing committee members pause. Votes that have gone against Lawrence were not cast frivolously. I hope that my review of material on the Bishop-elect of South Carolina will facilitate the evaluation of Mark Lawrence’s case, from whatever standpoint.
Tobias Haller, whose thoughtful blog is called “In a Godward Direction,” has offered an observation on item (a) in the South Carolina letter. He points out that, in the securities world, “investors are advised that ‘past performance is no guarantee of future performance.’” In the economy, of course, nothing is ever static, so one should never count on all things being equal. The Episcopal Church doesn’t look too predictable either. In any case, as Tobias points out, ordination vows “aren’t about the past or the present, but the future.”
The South Carolinians asked that standing committees that have voted to withhold consent for Mark Lawrence’s consecration reconsider their vote. I suggest that standing committees that have given consent also reconsider. Resistance to granting consent is clearly strong, a fact that should give standing committee members pause. Votes that have gone against Lawrence were not cast frivolously. I hope that my review of material on the Bishop-elect of South Carolina will facilitate the evaluation of Mark Lawrence’s case, from whatever standpoint.
Tobias Haller, whose thoughtful blog is called “In a Godward Direction,” has offered an observation on item (a) in the South Carolina letter. He points out that, in the securities world, “investors are advised that ‘past performance is no guarantee of future performance.’” In the economy, of course, nothing is ever static, so one should never count on all things being equal. The Episcopal Church doesn’t look too predictable either. In any case, as Tobias points out, ordination vows “aren’t about the past or the present, but the future.”
February 17, 2007
The Consents Question, Again
The question of consents for the consecration of the Very Rev. Mark Lawrence as Bishop of South Carolina is again in the news. Episcopal News Service (ENS) yesterday released a story based on a letter from the president of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina. The letter, signed by the Rev. J. Haden McCormick, was recently posted on the diocese’s Web site. Presumably, it has been sent to standing committees that have already voted to deny consent for Lawrence’s consecration, as it requests that the decision to withhold consent be reconsidered. According to the Web site, “a similar but not identical letter has been sent to those Standing Committees who [sic] have not yet responded to the request for consent.” No one has come forward with a copy of that letter, though there is no reason to think it is much different from what has been made public already.
Lawrence is Bishop-elect of South Carolina, but he cannot be consecrated, under Episcopal Church canons, unless a majority of standing committees and bishops with jurisdiction each consent to his consecration. The voting on consents normally is carried out in obscurity, but the circumstances surrounding the episcopal election of September 16, 2006, have drawn the attention not only of Episcopalians throughout the church, but of many observers in the wider Anglican Communion as well. Consents from 56 standing committees are needed by March 9 if Lawrence is to become the next Bishop of South Carolina. It is rumored that, with somewhat more than half the church’s standing committees’ having responded, somewhat more than half of those have withheld consent.
Background
In October 2006, I wrote an essay arguing that Lawrence’s consecration would not be in the best interests of The Episcopal Church. Copies of “No Consents: A Crucial Test for The Episcopal Church” were sent by Via Media USA (VMUSA), along with cover letters, to bishops and standing committees. Two weeks later, Episcopal Forum of South Carolina (EFSC), a Via Media USA alliance member, sent its own letter urging caution in considering whether to consent to Lawrence’s consecration. (ENS reported on both the VMUSA and EFSC initiatives.) Wake Up, a New York-based alliance favoring an inclusive church, subsequently issued its “Wake Up Call No.3, “There is an Impediment,” arguing against allowing Lawrence to become a bishop and urging Episcopalians to lobby their bishops and standing committees to prevent his consecration.
Even supporters of Lawrence quickly acknowledged that the San Joaquin priest could be a hard sell as South Carolina bishop. (“Lawrence’s consent may prove difficult,” South Carolina Canon Theologian Kendall Harmon observed a few days after the election.) Bloggers Father Jake, Tobias Haller, Mark Harris, and Christopher Johnson, among others, weighed in on the question of consents. Public controversy was reignited in early December, when Simon Sarmiento posted a letter from Lawrence on “Thinking Anglicans” intended, one assumes, to reassure his critics. (See ENS story of December 10.) It did nothing of the sort. Tobias Haller responded with a post titled, simply, “No.” Mark Harris gave his analysis of the Lawrence letter, and I posted an analysis, including a footnoted version of the Lawrence letter, that I called “The Annotated Mark Lawrence.”
It would be difficult to evaluate the current tally of consents from public sources alone, but the votes of a few standing committees have been made public. At least two standing committees, those of Bethlehem and Kansas, have not only announced their decisions to withhold consent, but have taken the extraordinary step of publishing their reasons for doing so. Andrew Gerns republished the Bethlehem statement on his blog, “Andrew Plus,” and commended the transparency achieved by Bethlehem to standing committees generally. Would that more of them would take this advice to heart.
The South Carolina Letters
As I suggested earlier, the consents required to consecrate Mark Lawrence have been slow in coming. ENS reported last month that the South Carolina Standing Committee had postponed Lawrence’s scheduled February 24 consecration. The deferment was attributed to “unanticipated delays in the mailing of the Consent Requests.” At best, this is wishful thinking. The Diocese of Newark, for example, elected Mark Beckwith a week after South Carolina chose Lawrence, and it endured the same bureaucratic trials in sending out its own consent requests. Nevertheless, Beckwith was consecrated Bishop of Newark on January 27, having received, without difficulty, the required consents both from standing committees and bishops with jurisdiction. The same day that the ENS story appeared, Lawrence wrote a rather petulant letter to his Bakersfield congregation explaining that plans to move to South Carolina were on hold.
Postponement of the Lawrence consecration, followed by the sending of letters, not only to standing committees that have not voted, but also to those that have already rejected Lawrence as a bishop, suggests some sense of panic in South Carolina. I am hardly one to suggest that the Standing Committee should not lobby for its point of view, however.
Has the Standing Committee contributed to a constructive dialogue, and, more to the point, will its letters likely achieve their desired effect on the standing committee vote? Certainly, the letters from South Carolina have inspired another round of blog posts, including this one. (Read, for example, “No more Bob Duncans” by the Admiral of Morality.) Before addressing these questions, it will be helpful to see what was actually written. The published letter is below. (I have not edited the text, which I copied from the Diocese of South Carolina Web site. Any errors are in the original.) The unpublished letter to standing committees that have not yet responded to the request for consents likely encourages the making of a timely decision; non-responses are counted as denials of consent.
Consider first the most trivial issue addressed by McCormick, the matter of the chief consecrator of the new bishop. It may be interesting that Bishops Salmon and Griswold agreed that the Presiding Bishop need not be chief consecrator, but I cannot imagine that any bishop or standing committee would, for an instant, consider withholding consent merely because a diocese was unwilling to have the Presiding Bishop serve in that capacity. In any case, the canons do not require the Presiding Bishop to be the chief consecrator. (This matter is dealt with in Canon III.11.6. The reference to Canon III.16.5 in the ENS story is erroneous, referring to the 2003, rather than the 2006 canons.) Nonetheless, someone must have raised this issue, since Lawrence addressed it in his letter of November 6. As does McCormick, Lawrence there attributes aversion to participation of the Presiding Bishop in his consecration to the diocese. Whereas when McCormick’s places responsibility for raising the chief consecrator issue at the feet of the diocese, he seems to be assuming responsibility, when Lawrence does so, it seems like a dodge.
There have been rumors that, should the consecration of Mark Lawrence not be consented to by The Episcopal Church, the Diocese of South Carolina might consecrate him anyway, perhaps by importing Anglican bishops for the purpose from other provinces. It is not clear whether McCormick intends to dispel such rumors, but he surely seems to want to seem to do so. In his final paragraph, he advises that “neither the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina nor the Bishop-elect have [sic] any interest in a consecration that does not follow the canons of this diocese.” Personally, I would have been more reassured had McCormick expressed a desire not to violate the canons of the General Convention. Whether this statement is a prevarication or is simply not phrased wisely, I cannot tell. In any case, it fails to be reassuring.
Item (a) in the letter is a muddle. The argument made is something like the following: The diocese and its Bishop-elect have been well-behaved in the past. Therefore, they are likely to behave properly in the future. Moreover, the diocese is growing, so it must be doing good and godly things.
The first argument is simply ludicrous. It is generally true, one might suppose, that things generally go along as they always have, all things being equal. (This “principle” is analogous to Newton’s First Law of Motion.) One must not fail to add the all things being equal caveat, however. In the current circumstances, all things are decidedly not equal. The diocese has asked for an extra-canonical relationship without consulting the General Convention and with the clear intent of circumventing its canons. Mark Lawrence has expressed approval of this request and the similar request from his own Diocese of San Joaquin. Moreover, Lawrence made an even more radical recommendation in his essay “A Prognosis for this Body Episcopal” in the June 11, 2006, issue of The Living Church, namely that The Episcopal Church should simply surrender its autonomy to the Anglican primates. Taking this bit of advice would amount simply to tossing church canons overboard. If one looks at the recent actions of the Diocese of South Carolina and of its Bishop-elect, therefore, one might indeed be able to predict their immediate future trajectory. That trajectory is not reassuring to Episcopalians who believe that our canons should be observed and changed as needed, and not simply be violated whenever it seems personally convenient to do so.
As for the argument that the “prosperousness” of South Carolina is some indicator of its godliness, one can only suspect that the diocese is infected with a severe case of creeping Calvinism if it actually finds this argument compelling. Moreover, not all Episcopalians in the Diocese of South Carolina would agree that the fruit of the diocese has been all that sweet. In no case does the “success” of the Diocese of South Carolina, however measured, give it the right to ignore the canons of The Episcopal Church.
Item (a) is oddly phrased, speaking as it does, of the diocese and its Bishop-elect as “faithful members of the Episcopal Church.” The diocese, of course, is not a member of The Episcopal Church, but an integral component of it. Mark Lawrence is certainly a member, but he aspires to become one of its leaders, a position that carries special obligations regarding church governance. Given other infelicitous constructions in McCormick’s letter, however, I should not, I suspect, make too much of this.
Finally, item (c) is more curious still. It is most notable for its absolving Lawrence of any responsibility for the request of the diocese for what the letter calls “Alternative Primatial Relationships” (APR). Standing committees do not vote on the faithfulness of electing dioceses, however, but only on whether a Bishop-elect should become a bishop. Any argument that APR would be helpful for the diocese or for The Episcopal Church is irrelevant if APR is to be obtained unlawfully. The fact remains that the diocese’s request seeks to subvert the polity of The Episcopal Church and circumvent the canons of the General Convention. That Lawrence has expressed approval of this request is indicative, at the very least, of an insensitivity to the polity of the church that alone should disqualify him from becoming an Episcopal bishop.
I am frankly confused about what McCormick is asserting is needed and would be provided by APR. How is isolation from the Presiding Bishop going “to restore peace to the diocese”? Is the diocese at war? What is he referring to when he writes that he wants “to prevent happening in the diocese what was being experienced in other dioceses within the Church”? Are other dioceses at war? He is on target, however, in observing that “Alternative Primatial Relationship has never been defined.” Most readers would take this as an indication that the Standing Committee’s request for APR was simply irresponsible. McCormick several times refers to “these matters,” but nowhere does he define just what matters “these matters” are. Is he afraid to say? Again, I have no idea. He concludes his discussion of APR with this sentence: “In the past, TEC has created a climate for discussions of these matters for congregations in an imaginative way and this is simply an expansion of that spirit.” Does anyone know what he is talking about?
Has the Standing Committee of the Diocese South Carolina made a helpful contribution to the dialogue on consents for Mark Lawrence? No. The McCormick letter is a jumble of non sequiturs and irrelevancies. Will the letters have their desired effect? Probably not.
Lawrence is Bishop-elect of South Carolina, but he cannot be consecrated, under Episcopal Church canons, unless a majority of standing committees and bishops with jurisdiction each consent to his consecration. The voting on consents normally is carried out in obscurity, but the circumstances surrounding the episcopal election of September 16, 2006, have drawn the attention not only of Episcopalians throughout the church, but of many observers in the wider Anglican Communion as well. Consents from 56 standing committees are needed by March 9 if Lawrence is to become the next Bishop of South Carolina. It is rumored that, with somewhat more than half the church’s standing committees’ having responded, somewhat more than half of those have withheld consent.
Background
In October 2006, I wrote an essay arguing that Lawrence’s consecration would not be in the best interests of The Episcopal Church. Copies of “No Consents: A Crucial Test for The Episcopal Church” were sent by Via Media USA (VMUSA), along with cover letters, to bishops and standing committees. Two weeks later, Episcopal Forum of South Carolina (EFSC), a Via Media USA alliance member, sent its own letter urging caution in considering whether to consent to Lawrence’s consecration. (ENS reported on both the VMUSA and EFSC initiatives.) Wake Up, a New York-based alliance favoring an inclusive church, subsequently issued its “Wake Up Call No.3, “There is an Impediment,” arguing against allowing Lawrence to become a bishop and urging Episcopalians to lobby their bishops and standing committees to prevent his consecration.
Even supporters of Lawrence quickly acknowledged that the San Joaquin priest could be a hard sell as South Carolina bishop. (“Lawrence’s consent may prove difficult,” South Carolina Canon Theologian Kendall Harmon observed a few days after the election.) Bloggers Father Jake, Tobias Haller, Mark Harris, and Christopher Johnson, among others, weighed in on the question of consents. Public controversy was reignited in early December, when Simon Sarmiento posted a letter from Lawrence on “Thinking Anglicans” intended, one assumes, to reassure his critics. (See ENS story of December 10.) It did nothing of the sort. Tobias Haller responded with a post titled, simply, “No.” Mark Harris gave his analysis of the Lawrence letter, and I posted an analysis, including a footnoted version of the Lawrence letter, that I called “The Annotated Mark Lawrence.”
It would be difficult to evaluate the current tally of consents from public sources alone, but the votes of a few standing committees have been made public. At least two standing committees, those of Bethlehem and Kansas, have not only announced their decisions to withhold consent, but have taken the extraordinary step of publishing their reasons for doing so. Andrew Gerns republished the Bethlehem statement on his blog, “Andrew Plus,” and commended the transparency achieved by Bethlehem to standing committees generally. Would that more of them would take this advice to heart.
The South Carolina Letters
As I suggested earlier, the consents required to consecrate Mark Lawrence have been slow in coming. ENS reported last month that the South Carolina Standing Committee had postponed Lawrence’s scheduled February 24 consecration. The deferment was attributed to “unanticipated delays in the mailing of the Consent Requests.” At best, this is wishful thinking. The Diocese of Newark, for example, elected Mark Beckwith a week after South Carolina chose Lawrence, and it endured the same bureaucratic trials in sending out its own consent requests. Nevertheless, Beckwith was consecrated Bishop of Newark on January 27, having received, without difficulty, the required consents both from standing committees and bishops with jurisdiction. The same day that the ENS story appeared, Lawrence wrote a rather petulant letter to his Bakersfield congregation explaining that plans to move to South Carolina were on hold.
Postponement of the Lawrence consecration, followed by the sending of letters, not only to standing committees that have not voted, but also to those that have already rejected Lawrence as a bishop, suggests some sense of panic in South Carolina. I am hardly one to suggest that the Standing Committee should not lobby for its point of view, however.
Has the Standing Committee contributed to a constructive dialogue, and, more to the point, will its letters likely achieve their desired effect on the standing committee vote? Certainly, the letters from South Carolina have inspired another round of blog posts, including this one. (Read, for example, “No more Bob Duncans” by the Admiral of Morality.) Before addressing these questions, it will be helpful to see what was actually written. The published letter is below. (I have not edited the text, which I copied from the Diocese of South Carolina Web site. Any errors are in the original.) The unpublished letter to standing committees that have not yet responded to the request for consents likely encourages the making of a timely decision; non-responses are counted as denials of consent.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,I find this letter quite curious, in that it seems more about the Diocese of South Carolina than about that diocese’s Bishop-elect. Perhaps it does clarify a few matters that, hitherto, were not crystal clear, but it fails to address the more important ambiguities in the statements made by Lawrence himself.
I write this letter as the head of the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina to address concerns expressed by various standing committees regarding consents for the consecration of The Very Rev. Mark Lawrence as our next Diocesan Bishop. This is an official request to those who have withheld consent to reconsider their initial action. We intend this letter to correct some of the misinformation surrounding our Bishop Elect.
a) Questions have been raised regarding Mark’s willingness and that of the diocese of South Carolina, should it be under his leadership, to continue to serve our Lord as faithful members of the Episcopal Church.
Response: The Diocese of South Carolina has operated faithfully within the canons of the The Episcopal Church (TEC) since 1795 and continues to do so. The Rev. Mark Lawrence signed the oath of conformity at his ordination as priest and has faithfully lived within the canons of the church for 26 years. When asked directly during our election process if he would be able to sign the oath of conformity as a bishop, he responded, “Yes”. Present behavior is the best indicator we have of the future. Statistics released at the last General Convention revealed that the Diocese of South Carolina was first in all categories of percentages of growth – average Sunday attendance, financial growth and baptized membership. Recent official church statistics show we are the only diocese that has grown faster than its surrounding population. The tree is known by its fruit.
b) Questions have been raised about the participation of the Presiding Bishop in the consecration of the new Bishop of South Carolina.
Response: When the election of the XIVth Bishop of South Carolina was scheduled to be held, (before the Church decided to withhold consent to all consecrations until June 2006) the Bishop of South Carolina XIII had negotiated with the Presiding Bishop’s office to find a chief consecrator acceptable to the Diocese of SC. A tentative agreement was reached with the Presiding Bishop’s office that this was indeed possible. Our Bishop-elect had nothing to do with this arrangement as this decision was worked out by the ecclesiastical authority of the Diocese of South Carolina before we held our election.
c) Questions have been raised about Alternative Primatial Relationships (APR), implying negative intentions about our relationship to The Episcopal Church (TEC)
Response: The Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina, after the General Convention 2006, requested APR), in order to restore peace to the diocese and to prevent happening in the diocese what was being experienced in other diocese within the Church. This was an action of the Standing Committee acting as the ecclesiastical authority of the Diocese prior to our Bishop’s election. This question is being answered by the Standing Committee for that reason. Alternative Primatial Relationship has never been defined, as it has never been requested by a diocese in the history of the Anglican Communion. In the context of the Windsor report and the scheduled primates meeting in Tanzania, the Standing Committee’s sole intention was to provide space for the conflict raging in TEC and to protect the common life and mission of a diocese that has grown faithfully for eighteen years. Our Diocesan Bishop XIII participated in a conversation regarding APR in New York in September of 2006 at the invitation of the Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold and the Presiding Bishop-elect Katharine Jefferts -Schiori and other bishops on all sides of the issues. We have consistently sought to deal with these matters within the framework of the Church as a sign of our long-term commitment to the mission of the whole Church. In the past, TEC has created a climate for discussions of these matters for congregations in an imaginative way and this is simply an expansion of that spirit.
In conclusion, neither the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina nor the Bishop-elect have any interest in a consecration that does not follow the canons of this diocese. We hope that you will find this information helpful as you re-consider the position you have taken concerning our Bishop-elect.
In Christ alone,
The Rev. J. Haden McCormick
For the Standing Committee
Consider first the most trivial issue addressed by McCormick, the matter of the chief consecrator of the new bishop. It may be interesting that Bishops Salmon and Griswold agreed that the Presiding Bishop need not be chief consecrator, but I cannot imagine that any bishop or standing committee would, for an instant, consider withholding consent merely because a diocese was unwilling to have the Presiding Bishop serve in that capacity. In any case, the canons do not require the Presiding Bishop to be the chief consecrator. (This matter is dealt with in Canon III.11.6. The reference to Canon III.16.5 in the ENS story is erroneous, referring to the 2003, rather than the 2006 canons.) Nonetheless, someone must have raised this issue, since Lawrence addressed it in his letter of November 6. As does McCormick, Lawrence there attributes aversion to participation of the Presiding Bishop in his consecration to the diocese. Whereas when McCormick’s places responsibility for raising the chief consecrator issue at the feet of the diocese, he seems to be assuming responsibility, when Lawrence does so, it seems like a dodge.
There have been rumors that, should the consecration of Mark Lawrence not be consented to by The Episcopal Church, the Diocese of South Carolina might consecrate him anyway, perhaps by importing Anglican bishops for the purpose from other provinces. It is not clear whether McCormick intends to dispel such rumors, but he surely seems to want to seem to do so. In his final paragraph, he advises that “neither the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina nor the Bishop-elect have [sic] any interest in a consecration that does not follow the canons of this diocese.” Personally, I would have been more reassured had McCormick expressed a desire not to violate the canons of the General Convention. Whether this statement is a prevarication or is simply not phrased wisely, I cannot tell. In any case, it fails to be reassuring.
Item (a) in the letter is a muddle. The argument made is something like the following: The diocese and its Bishop-elect have been well-behaved in the past. Therefore, they are likely to behave properly in the future. Moreover, the diocese is growing, so it must be doing good and godly things.
The first argument is simply ludicrous. It is generally true, one might suppose, that things generally go along as they always have, all things being equal. (This “principle” is analogous to Newton’s First Law of Motion.) One must not fail to add the all things being equal caveat, however. In the current circumstances, all things are decidedly not equal. The diocese has asked for an extra-canonical relationship without consulting the General Convention and with the clear intent of circumventing its canons. Mark Lawrence has expressed approval of this request and the similar request from his own Diocese of San Joaquin. Moreover, Lawrence made an even more radical recommendation in his essay “A Prognosis for this Body Episcopal” in the June 11, 2006, issue of The Living Church, namely that The Episcopal Church should simply surrender its autonomy to the Anglican primates. Taking this bit of advice would amount simply to tossing church canons overboard. If one looks at the recent actions of the Diocese of South Carolina and of its Bishop-elect, therefore, one might indeed be able to predict their immediate future trajectory. That trajectory is not reassuring to Episcopalians who believe that our canons should be observed and changed as needed, and not simply be violated whenever it seems personally convenient to do so.
As for the argument that the “prosperousness” of South Carolina is some indicator of its godliness, one can only suspect that the diocese is infected with a severe case of creeping Calvinism if it actually finds this argument compelling. Moreover, not all Episcopalians in the Diocese of South Carolina would agree that the fruit of the diocese has been all that sweet. In no case does the “success” of the Diocese of South Carolina, however measured, give it the right to ignore the canons of The Episcopal Church.
Item (a) is oddly phrased, speaking as it does, of the diocese and its Bishop-elect as “faithful members of the Episcopal Church.” The diocese, of course, is not a member of The Episcopal Church, but an integral component of it. Mark Lawrence is certainly a member, but he aspires to become one of its leaders, a position that carries special obligations regarding church governance. Given other infelicitous constructions in McCormick’s letter, however, I should not, I suspect, make too much of this.
Finally, item (c) is more curious still. It is most notable for its absolving Lawrence of any responsibility for the request of the diocese for what the letter calls “Alternative Primatial Relationships” (APR). Standing committees do not vote on the faithfulness of electing dioceses, however, but only on whether a Bishop-elect should become a bishop. Any argument that APR would be helpful for the diocese or for The Episcopal Church is irrelevant if APR is to be obtained unlawfully. The fact remains that the diocese’s request seeks to subvert the polity of The Episcopal Church and circumvent the canons of the General Convention. That Lawrence has expressed approval of this request is indicative, at the very least, of an insensitivity to the polity of the church that alone should disqualify him from becoming an Episcopal bishop.
I am frankly confused about what McCormick is asserting is needed and would be provided by APR. How is isolation from the Presiding Bishop going “to restore peace to the diocese”? Is the diocese at war? What is he referring to when he writes that he wants “to prevent happening in the diocese what was being experienced in other dioceses within the Church”? Are other dioceses at war? He is on target, however, in observing that “Alternative Primatial Relationship has never been defined.” Most readers would take this as an indication that the Standing Committee’s request for APR was simply irresponsible. McCormick several times refers to “these matters,” but nowhere does he define just what matters “these matters” are. Is he afraid to say? Again, I have no idea. He concludes his discussion of APR with this sentence: “In the past, TEC has created a climate for discussions of these matters for congregations in an imaginative way and this is simply an expansion of that spirit.” Does anyone know what he is talking about?
Has the Standing Committee of the Diocese South Carolina made a helpful contribution to the dialogue on consents for Mark Lawrence? No. The McCormick letter is a jumble of non sequiturs and irrelevancies. Will the letters have their desired effect? Probably not.
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