A direct violation of I.18.2b (2006) of the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church.  Not that that makes a difference to anybody.  I’m just saying.

Bruce Robison

#1. Correct. General Convention is now operating above/beyond its own legal parameters. It gave permission (apparently, depending on whether one views resolutions as binding—people take turns on that) for Bishops to do what +Shaw has declared he is doing: using BCP services for same-sex couples. On the floor of convention +Frey said the resolution would be allowing a violation of BCP and BCP is constitutional. He was politely ignored.

Amazing how much mileage +Shaw & co. (+KJS) get out of their disinformation strategy about the Church’s evolving understanding of marraige.

By what authority does he say that marriage is not the union of one man and one woman, but that the Church should give its blesing to relationships of any two people exhibiting “fidelity, monogamy, mutual affection and respect”?  It seems if you turn your back on the authority for one, you’ve undermined your argument for the rest of the package.

Pax Christi,
Chuck Bradshaw, Hulls Cove, Maine

Bp Scruton of W Mass will not allow same-sex blessings, and certainly not with a pronoun-adjusted BCP service.  However, when GC does make the changes needed to canonically permit same-sex “marriage,” he will permit such ceremonies.  He gives more weight to the canons than he does to Scripture, sad to say.

Moratoria?  What moratoria?

My sense of the phrase “generous pastoral response” in the General Convention resolution—which I voted against—was that it was intended by its drafters to allow bishops to authorize, in dioceses in states where same-sex civil marriage is on the books, something like what Bishop Shaw was authorizing up to this point: actions conducted more or less within the conceptual frame of the BCP office for the Blessing of a Civil Marriage.  A good deal was made in Anaheim of the point that what the resolution didn’t[/] do was effect a change in the marriage canon.  (I’m pretty sure a change of the marriage canon would in fact have had majority support in the HoD, but I think the feeling was that the bishops weren’t ready, um, “yet,” to go that far.) 

Shhh!  Don’t tell the Archbishop of Canterbury!

How many times can you sing Blowin’ in the Windsor Process’ ear?

About as many premature Lambeth invitations as the ABC sent.

Has the Bishop renounced his ministry in this church by this canonical illegality?

Driver8, assuming that you’re part of TEC, perhaps you might convince some clergy and laity to bring a presentment against +Shaw for violating the canons.  Not that it would do any good, since TEC seems hell-bent on violating them as well.

TEC is at the end of the rope, I’d say.  Left hanging, TEC isn’t attracting the living.  Intrinsically disordered lifestyle is against the Gospel.  To mock Holy Matrimony is against the Gospel.  And the evidence is?  TEC is not attracting the living.

#10 Sadly where the law makers and the judges are the same people, justice is distributed or denied at their whim. However as the Bishop is incontrovertibly rejecting the discipline of this church then one can surely expect him not to be tried but simply to be “renounced”. Indeed this very communication can be taken as his letter of renunciation.

OK, now what Neff Powell?

You said that giving “generous pastoral responses” wouldn’t lead to this.  You gave us this mess because you voted to open the door to your fellow bishops to run AMOK.