{"id":2179,"date":"2005-09-20T22:28:26","date_gmt":"2005-09-20T22:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/while-everyone-is-obssessing-about-rcs-and-the-gay-question.html"},"modified":"2005-09-20T22:28:26","modified_gmt":"2005-09-20T22:28:26","slug":"while-everyone-is-obssessing-about-rcs-and-the-gay-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/while-everyone-is-obssessing-about-rcs-and-the-gay-question.html","title":{"rendered":"While everyone is obssessing about RCs and the gay question"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Anglican Communion is getting closer and closer to a split over the issue:<\/p>\n

Nigerian church makes a point:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Nigeria’s Anglican church has deleted all references to the mother church in Britain from its constitution, deepening a rift over homosexuality but stopping short of a feared schism.<\/p>\n

The Nigeria and Ugandan Anglican churches broke ties with the U.S. Episcopal Church over its 2003 consecration of a gay bishop living with a partner. A new dispute over same-sex unions in England has deepened divisions.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, a statement on the Nigerian church’s Web site said that "all former references to ‘communion with the see of Canterbury’ were deleted" at a meeting last week. Instead, the constitution affirms ties with all churches that maintain the "faith, doctrine, sacrament and discipline of the one holy, Catholic and apostolic church."<\/p>\n

With 17.5 million members, Nigeria’s church is second only to the mother Church of England among the branches in the 77 million-member worldwide Anglican Communion.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Washington bishop has words, in turn:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
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The Episcopal Bishop of Washington John Chane has blasted the Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola saying that he did not speak for the whole church, focused too much on sexuality issues and failed to address poverty in his own country.<\/p>\n

Writing in the September issue of Washington Window the diocesan newspaper, Chane excoriated the Nigerian Primate saying he was "one of the most outspoken of this small group of men who presumes to speak for the entire global Communion."<\/p>\n

Chane then ripped Akinola saying that he did not speak for him in how he interprets the Bible.<\/p>\n

"If the Church is to really focus on the issues of the Bible’s teaching and the core teachings of Jesus Christ, why does this Archbishop spend so much time on human sexuality issues while so many of his countrymen and women are oppressed by poverty, illiteracy and violence? Where is the strong voice of the Nigerian Anglican Church in opposing the continued neglect of vulnerable women and children, or in advocating on behalf of the poorest of the poor? Jesus was very clear in his hard teachings that one could always tell the righteous from the damned by whether they lived into feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger and visiting those who were in prison."<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And if you haven’t yet seen it elsewhere: "Farewell, Church of England" from the New Critereon:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

A<\/span>s we prepare for our Harvest Festival Services, we see that what\u2019s left of the English Church is indistinguishable from a lunatic asylum. Everywhere you peer inside this once refined and educated, lovely and lovable national institution, there is only a mania for self-destruction. How else can you account for church services that compete with pantomime for dramatized idiocy? For example, I recently attended a conference for clergy at a beautiful medieval church in Oxford. It was supposed to be a choral Eucharist but there was no organ music\u2014only some plinky-plonky stuff on an out-of-tune piano and mindless choruses in the Jesus Goes to Toytown<\/em> fashion: interminable glum repetition of what was not worth singing once. <\/p>\n

Then the Bishop came on and told us that at the laughably misnamed riot called \u201cThe Peace\u201d he didn\u2019t want us merely to shake hands but to \u201chug one another\u201d\u2014and not just to hug one another, but to put our arms on our neighbor\u2019s shoulders and say three times, \u201cYou are everlastingly loved.\u201d When, with varying degrees of squeamishness, grown men fawned on one another in this way, the Bishop came on again in full pantomime mode and said, \u201cNot loud enough! Again\u2014louder!\u201d Not one word from the Book of Common Prayer<\/em> throughout the three-day conference or indeed from any source that might be identified as religious in the traditional sense. And that Bishop is now Archbishop of York. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Anglican Communion is getting closer and closer to a split over the issue: Nigerian church makes a point: Nigeria’s Anglican church has deleted all references to the mother church in Britain from its constitution, deepening a rift over homosexuality but stopping short of a feared schism. The Nigeria and Ugandan Anglican churches broke ties…<\/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-2179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWhile everyone is obssessing about RCs and the gay question - 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\/2005\/09\/while-everyone-is-obssessing-about-rcs-and-the-gay-question.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"While everyone is obssessing about RCs and the gay question - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Anglican Communion is getting closer and closer to a split over the issue: Nigerian church makes a point: Nigeria’s Anglican church has deleted all references to the mother church in Britain from its constitution, deepening a rift over homosexuality but stopping short of a feared schism. 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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\/2179","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=2179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}