{"id":1019,"date":"2006-06-18T00:43:17","date_gmt":"2006-06-18T00:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-church-of-the-flunkey.html"},"modified":"2006-06-18T00:43:17","modified_gmt":"2006-06-18T00:43:17","slug":"the-church-of-the-flunkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-church-of-the-flunkey.html","title":{"rendered":"“The Church of the Flunkey”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Also from the Times UK, a story about the divisions of the Anglican Church in..Zimbawe. Over slightly different issues than divide their brothers and sisters here.<\/a><\/p>\n

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HE has used a combination of threats and patronage to keep military, police and party officials on his side as Zimbabwe descends into economic chaos. Now President Robert Mugabe seems intent on co-opting the church, leaving Anglicans bitterly divided. <\/p>\n

More than half the Anglican priests from Harare, the largest diocese, have fled the country, protesting that the church has become an extension of the regime. At least 10 have sought sanctuary in Britain. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n
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The controversy revolves around Nolbert Kunonga, the Bishop of Harare, who last year became the first Anglican priest in Africa in more than 100 years to face prosecution by his peers. The charges included preaching racial hatred. <\/p>\n

Since his appointment in 2001 Kunonga has consistently used his pulpit at St Mary\u2019s Cathedral to praise Mugabe and decry critics of the regime. As a reward he was given a farm and a seven-bedroomed house overlooking a lake. <\/p>\n

Now the 56-year-old bishop has started ordaining government ministers and party officials with no theological training, including Joseph Msika, the vice-president. <\/p>\n

Any priest who dares to speak out finds himself transferred to a remote parish and intimidated. <\/p>\n

\u201cKunonga has terrorised Christians and turned the diocese into a religious branch of [the ruling] Zanu-PF,\u201d said a priest now living in England. He asked to remain anonymous as his family is still in Harare. <\/p>\n

So serious is the situation that Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has intervened with the Home Office to help some priests to enter Britain. \u201cThe Church of England has received and assisted clerical refugees from the diocese of Harare,\u201d said Lambeth Palace. <\/p>\n

Williams has broken a long silence on the matter with a statement to The Sunday Times in effect calling for the Bishop of Harare to be suspended.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Also from the Times UK, a story about the divisions of the Anglican Church in..Zimbawe. Over slightly different issues than divide their brothers and sisters here. HE has used a combination of threats and patronage to keep military, police and party officials on his side as Zimbabwe descends into economic chaos. Now President Robert Mugabe…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n"The Church of the Flunkey" - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/06\/the-church-of-the-flunkey.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""The Church of the Flunkey" - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Also from the Times UK, a story about the divisions of the Anglican Church in..Zimbawe. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}