Posted on 01/23/2009 11:52:41 AM PST by rabscuttle385
The Rt. Rev. Peter James Lee, who has been bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia for 24 years, announced today that he will step down Oct. 1 to make way for a successor who was named in 2007.
The diocese, which covers northern and eastern Virginia and includes 80,000 members, is one of the largest in the Episcopal Church, the U.S.-based branch of the global Anglican Communion.
Starting this fall the diocese will be overseen by the Rt. Rev. Shannon Johnston, 50, an Alabama native who has worked in dioceses in the South and is known for his work in prison, music and HIV/AIDS ministries.
Under the laws of the Episcopal Church, a bishop must retire either by age 72 or no more than three years after a successor is consecrated.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Ping!
I'll pray for him. Maybe when he's retired he'll come to see how he was bamboozled and how he bamboozled others.
Johnston is a descendant of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston.
He was either highly dishonest, or a total coward. And I’m being generous.
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams.
FReepmail Huber or sionnsar if you want on or off this low-volume ping list.
This list is pinged by Huber and sionnsar.
Resource for Traditional Anglicans: http://trad-anglican.faithweb.com
Humor: The Anglican Blue
Speak the truth in love. Eph 4:15
He does have nice hair.
He was a nice bishop, not a take charge type, who honestly wanted to go along to get along. And I don't think he appreciated the real motives of the folks in charge of the national church.
Events overtook and overwhelmed him, and I really think that when the ground was cut from under him he had no idea what to do. To the extent that he allowed himself to be ruled by 815, his bad. But I've been inside a bad organization before (in fact a branch of the SAME bad organization), and the leaders can be very plausible and very persuasive, and before you know it you're in too deep to get out. Happened to a lot of basically nice people I knew.
We got out -- our emotional and financial ties were not as deep as some folks', and we didn't have anybody buried in the graveyard.
Just to clarify, you are talking about the Bishop, not a middle manager in the SS? Because with a few minor modifications, the description would fit either.
Maybe some Staatsbeamt functionary in some little country town (the Diocese of Virginia isn't all that big really), overly impressed by some bigwigs from Berlin.
And, oh yeah, I call Godwin’s Law. The comparison is ridiculuous in this case.
I thought, "Good! A Bishop who believes in matrimony a little." So maybe 4 years later a couple comes to me to get hitched and at least one of t hem had two or three priors. So I go to El Obispo and somewhere in the interim all that good stuff had been thrown out the window!
And when I went to him with MY particular beef about 815 allowing a confessor to be forced (by threats of huge contempt fines) to violate "the seal", he had a lot of weasel reasons why it wasn't the calamity I thought it was.
And he gave some totally BS reason for signing off on VIcki Gene's condesecration, and much later he said that, well, actually he thought that homosexuality was okay.
So, was he a weasel or a poltroon?
I think the BS about Vicki Gene was weaselly. I don't know about the retret on matrimony. But what I do know is that an Episcopal bishop has such incredibly circumscribed power that he pretty much has to govern by dishonesty, manipulation, and popularity contest. And the TIDE of liberlism in TEC was something awesome to behold. Evidently at some clergy conference or maybe at Diocesan Council they were debating abortion, and some priestette gets up and pulls the whole, "This is so painful for me to hear this debated. After all, I've HAD an abortion and this is all personal for moi."
In other words: I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman, and you'd better not talk or even think about stuff that makes me uncomfortable, despite the fact that it is the church's JOB to provide moral consideration and guidance.
And in what was one of the last councils I attended, TEC's pretended stand against divorce was assaulted by someone who said that in the bad old days, life expectancy was short and an less than delightful marriage was not likely to last long because somebody would probably get sick and die. But in these days, advances in modern medicine have reduced deaths in childbirth and generally given us far longer lives. SO it is just too much to expect people t o stay married for these new-fangled long lives.
It's hard to type about this because it so easily lends itself to satire. Apparently the point is that the curse of modern medicine has so blighted our lives that we moderns simply cannot be expected to keep our marital vows, burdened as we are with interminable lives and the unwelcome recovery of our childrens' mother from the perils of parturition or her husbands ungenerous refusal to succumb to pneumonia or the grippe. Modern medicine confronts us with trials our Lord simply cannot have imagined.
I am so glad I got outta there. Comparative poverty and job insecurity is balm and delight compared to enduring such councils and counsels.
Sometimes it's just a question of whether you're willing to sell out EVERY principle you have to keep your job. Apparently, he was.
You're well out of it, you were certainly in much deeper than we were and it took an order of magnitude more courage to get out.
Unfortunately I see the whole country being swallowed up by that sort of liberal government-by-consensusblackmail.
I've read that only about 50,000 SS folks were involved by war crimes. So that leaves a lot of folks who didn't get their hands dirty. And the guy in Berlin that had to track soap and toilet paper usage doesn't have the same culpability as a death camp commandant. As for the Godwin’s Law comment - it is comforting to try to think of Nazis as being uniquely evil, but most of them were just ordinary folks.
I can't speak for the state of the immortal souls of anyone. As C.S. Lewis said, whether you're positioned so that your anger sends millions to their deaths or simply causes folks in the office to laugh and make fun of you, the stain on the soul is the same.
Leaving that aside, it is ridiculous to compare a relatively powerless, mostly irrelevant and aging church of only 2 million (if that - that's THEIR number, which I know includes us even though we left 6 years ago) with a totalitarian national government that managed to murder 8-10 million people.
Yes. A bishop who leads his flock toward death and destruction has far more to answer for than someone who made sure the trains were running on time - even if they were running to Buchenwald.
Point taken, however. I can't understand why anybody would WANT to be a bishop ('nolo episcopare') because of the overwhelming responsibility for the souls of other people. (The good news for Bishop Lee is that his ordination is invalid so he's really not a bishop at all).
But as for leading souls to perdition, anybody who is actually listening to a ECUSA bishop after all of the brouhaha of the past 10 years, let alone the past 50, is either a nonbeliever or simply a social member, in which case the bishop's apostasy is just another bucket of water to a drowning man -- or he is invincibly ignorant, in which case the bishop doesn't matter at all.
Most faithful Christians who are still in ECUSA are hunkering down in their individual parishes and ignoring whatever the bishops and the national church are up to.
Well, if Lee had shown the honesty and integrity of Vicki Gene, I’d cut him more slack.
But I figured that 815 had photographs of him in a house of ill repute or something, he folded so quickly.
I had him set down for a weak but well intentioned man, but it sounds like he was an out and out coward.
I wonder what they had on him.
Maybe the whole thing is a study in how the virtues have to work together. Seriously, I would say that Peter didn't consciously sell out. It's more that, when you cut through all the elegant, aesthetic, and 'reasonable' static, what you have left is a group with which the very concept of principle is incompatible. There is always some fine-sounding slogan, as in, "we've never been a confessional church," which sounds like it means something especially Anglican, but comes down to "We don't have any articulatable standards or canons of belief."
So I'm asking us to picture a guy who has a sense that he has to preserve and teach SOMETHING, but it's not quite clear what, and then discovers that some of his presbyters are indistinguishable from Calvinists, others ditto from Unitarians, while others are still trying to manifest a kind of updated Hookerian worldview, and others are commies with vestments.
And you've already taken a position and somehow advanced in a group in which, as you hope, this diversity will somehow lead to God's will being done and His truth being proclaimed.
AND you have sufficient humility to think, when confronted with the kind of nonsense I described earlier, that maybe your sudden wave of revulsion is a sign of your sinfulness and "intolerance."
I guess I'm proposing a kind of ecclesiastical Stockholm Syndrome, or something analogous.
Another way of presenting it, a way closer to my problem, is to ask yo to sort of imagine the unfolding of distress, confusion, and moral debilitation when you think of yourself as under obedience, and then look around and realize that neither your superiors, inferiors, or equals think of themselves in such a position nor expect you to think of yourself as in such a position.
I remember (cue mists, soft focus and harp arpeggio) when I was on the staff on the Cathedral in Jackson and was urging us to conform our liturgies to the rubrics. A colleague angrily said that I wanted to have everything MY way!
That was exactly what I did NOT want. I wanted to have everything the Church's way. But that was taken as just one opinion among many, and my contention for that opinion was seen as no less partisan than somebody else contending for having the Eucharist celebrated with Fritos and Pepsi!
So I don't think it's simply a lack of courage. It's more that when such courage as one might be given is expended fighting for the wrong side.
In a larger sense, it's a kind of testimony to the falsehood of dualism: If you're backing any but the right cause, sooner or later all the virtues will be simply impossible.
(I'm going to have to run that past my Thomist buddies. But I think it might go like courage will decay into wrath and stubbornness; prudence into cowardice, temperance into fussiness, and justive into judgmentalism. Maybe.)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.