FORWARD IN FAITH LEADER CALLS FOR IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION

Virtuosity ^ | 3 December 2003 | David Virtue

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FORWARD IN FAITH LEADER CALLS FOR IMMEDIATE INTERVENTION

By David W. Virtue

ORLANDO, FL-The President of Forward in Faith North America is calling for the immediate intervention of bishops to move across diocesan boundaries to provide adequate episcopal oversight for the new Network of Confessing Dioceses and Parishes.

Fr. David Moyer, rector of Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont, Pa., told 50 leaders, bishops, clergy and laity at the Third U.S. Anglican Congress here that orthodox ECUSA bishops should declare themselves to be in communion with bishops of the emerging church and delegate them to assist with adequate episcopal oversight.

"A bishop of the Church Catholic and Apostolic has the power and authority to make this judgment. It is the bishop's prerogative," he said.

"I believe that simultaneously with these joined and mutually recognized and affirmed relationships among a new college of bishops should be prayerful hope and active engagement with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Communions." Fr. Moyer said he sensed that Rome wants to identify Anglicans who are upholders of Catholic truth and Apostolic Order.

Fr. Moyer said a new alignment would have to define the group by the Catholic religion. "We can't be both Catholic and Protestant, and classical Anglicanism has always claimed to be a reformed Catholicism. Anglican catholicity has no future without some form of a magesterium. If the Archbishop of Canterbury begins to manifest an enhanced role of authority as he is being encouraged to do, this is a welcome development."

The Philadelphia-based Anglo-Catholic priest who is in litigation proceedings against the revisionist Bishop of Pennsylvania, Charles E. Bennison, called on brother bishops to separate themselves from false shepherds. "Not to do so is a violation of a major element of your historic role, and allows false shepherds to continue to confuse and mislead the precious redeemed souls of Christ's body. This is a salvation."

Fr. Moyer blasted revisionist bishops and clergy, who he said, "don't give a damn about the Anglican Communion, and really believe that the Christians of the Global South are hopelessly fundamentalist and intellectually impaired."

"I don't think we can wait another moment to act with force for the Gospel and Apostolic teaching, for the thousands of people who are looking for leaders to do something, and to show the tyrannists that we mean what we say."

Fr. Moyer said the acceptance of women's ordination was an assault on the Catholic and Apostolic integrity of the Church. "It rode on the coattails of women's liberation and civil rights, and there was not a sufficient enough theological foundation in ECUSA to reject it as antithetical to biblical revelation and Catholic and Apostolic Order and development."

"Women's ordination was the camel's nose under the tent, said Moyer, citing Sydney Archbishop Peter Jensen that the same hermeneutic that brought us women's ordination also brought us Gene Robinson and same- sex marriages."

Fr. Moyer said it was a serious Christological issue with both Rome and Orthodoxy theologically definitive on this, and we need to heed their position and judgment if we regard ourselves as Catholics.

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Ping.

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Fr. Moyer said it was a serious Christological issue, with both Rome and Orthodoxy theologically definitive on this, and we need to heed their position and judgment if we regard ourselves as Catholics.

'nuf said