Matthew 16:18
Welcome home, Reverend Gipson. Your pectoral cross has lead you.
Excellent news!
Welcome home, Rev. Larry Gipson.
I am a member of the the nation’s largest Episcopal Church, St Martins, joined by transfer in 1999 when Rev Larry Gipson was there as rector (he is a great and intellectual preacher). I was raised Episcopalian, but after 50+ years, presently (for the last 3 months) attend RCIA classes at the Roman Catholic Anglican Rite church Our Lady of Walsingham, where, much to my surprise, we saw Larry and Mary Francis admitted into the Catholic Church as converts/members a few weeks ago at the Sunday service. No doubt Larry is destined for great leadership in the Ordinariate - he has a Yale Doctorate of Divinity and recently attained a Masters in Catholic Theology from St Mary’s seminary. If they are smart, they will move to ordain him and put him in a high position of leadership swiftly, in the Catholic Church.
Larry has been attending the same Catholic seminary in town where Mrs FE has attained a masters degree, and for years, he used to ask her for her book lists from her classes. Larry Gipson is one of the leading theological thinkers in America, in my view. It is fitting to see that such an astounding event as his conversion to Catholicism is recorded in the leading liberal birdcage liner of our Nation’s capitol, the Washington Post, the second most propagandist communist newspaper in America, behind the NYT.
I am not sure how it will end yet for me personally on my faith journey, but will not be surprised if Mrs FE and I are swimming the Tiber too at Eastertime, at the end of the RCIA classes. We are not in the midst of an exodus yet from St Martins, in fact, until we saw Larry and Mary Frances, none of our St Martins members have appeared at OLW.
The Episcopal Church has gone off the deep end entirely. We fought it from within for a long time. Free Republic kept a steady log of the epic decline at the hand of ArchMoron Frank Griswold and ArchDestroyer Squid Jefferts, and Anglican Archbishop Druid Bonehead Williams, who allowed the Episcopal church to go ahead and ordain a gay divorced (and later gay-married) bishop, instituted same sex blessing liturgy, denied the Lord jesus Christ Christ as the path to salvation, and other egregious acts against the Christian faith. The inability to adhere to the faith is due to an internal governance that is flawed to the advantage of heretical thought. These are not new heresies - they are ancient heresies. Even though the liberal idiots think they are doing a new thing, their heresies have been condemned as far back as the writing of Leviticus, and the universalist heresies and other idiocy has old deep roots undermining the faith since antiquity. These modern liberals are not thinking up new outrages, they are the same outrages that caused the Archangel Michael to cast the dragon down in ancient times. The cultural relativism issues also go back to the creation of the Anglican church in the time of Henry VIII, continued throughout the 1800s leading to the conversion ultimately of John Cardinal Newman and CS Lewis among famous personages. The USA version has a severe thread of heretical teaching relating to denial of the very basics in the apostles creed, of the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ, immaculate conception, the basics of the sacraments, nevermind the current flirtation with pluriform truth and blessing gay marriages and other such abominations. The Episcopal Church is afflicted with a combination of heresy, liberal guilt, and a desire to litigate away all the wealth and social good of the institution in the interest of cultural relativism, and at the expence of personal and institutional intellectual honesty and integrity and honor to the Holy Sacraments, history and traditions of the church, and Word of God. In short, it is a shambles. Even a powerful brilliant leader like Larry cannot stem the decline. What happened to Larry Gipson is a micro-reflection of the illness, and ultimately the fatal decline of the Episcopal Church, now in a death spiral.
Personally I believe that only the Apostolic tradition as handed down through Roman Catholic faith can keep Christianity intact in these times, in the face of global economic, social and political decline and decadence, rising Islamism and a political economic and social ethos that is seemingly intent on the destruction of western civilization and culture, with basic preservation of life, freedom, and family, as certainly envisioned by the founders of our free republic. It may require some compromises and I certainly see the failings of the Catholic Church in these modern times, but the alternative, I am afraid, is that the entire fabric of society, politics and economy gets unravelled at ever-increasing velocity.