Why is the Episcopal Church Near Collapse?
January 6, 2013 3 Comments
Prominent bishops are pulling out. Convention-goers were told headquarters had spent $18 million suing local congregations. Members are leaving at a record rate. This is no longer George Washington’s church – once the largest denomination in the colonies.
The lengthy article can be read at beliefnet.
And a snippet:
“On July 8, 2012, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori preached her brand of post-Christian religion while masquerading as a Christian bishop,” reported convention attendee Dr. Sarah Frances Ives.
“She mocked most of the crucial doctrines of the Christian faith, including the God of creation, the Incarnation, and the Trinity. She accomplishes this through her demeaning use of rhetoric. She taunts the Lord by the use of the name ‘Big Man’ and then points her finger at everyone listening and tells them that they have ‘missed the boat.’
“Jefferts Schori then proclaims that she has the answer for this. We all need the ‘act of crossing boundaries’ to become God after which our hands become a ‘sacrament of mission.’
“In this sermon, Jefferts Schori continued her mission of destroying the Christian faith through her rhetorical device of dismissive ridicule.
“Jefferts Schori leaves a wide wake of destruction behind with this sermon: the eternal triune God has been torn down, human beings are to boldly claim our place as God…
About Fr Stephen Smuts
If those former Episcopalians enter the Catholic Church, I hope it’s because of something they believe in, rather than what they disagree with.
Some people have portrayed or assumed that Anglicans wanted to join the Catholic Church because they disagreed with women and gay bishops, and so forth.
Indeed.
IF former adherents see the Episcopalian disaster as proof positive that their former beliefs about that body were mistaken, AND on the contrary see the doctrine and ecclesiology of the Catholic Church as convincing precisely in the areas where Episcopalianism has evident flaws, then all well and good, it would be logical and reasonable to consider moving from the former to the latter, praying always for Divine help and guidance.
Of course, if a person, while thinking Episcopalianism is self-evidently self-destructing, does not agree with the doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church, then of course it would be wholly irrational to flee to her; such a one should strive to find the truth, of course (and as a Catholic myself I hope they would find it in the Catholic Church eventually), but humanly speaking I can quite understand those who go to one of the Continuing Anglican jurisdictions, or to the Eastern Orthodox (whether holus-bolus or into the Western Rite Vicariate of either ROCOR or the Antiochian Church, which are, so far as I can see, analogous to the Ordinariates).
A family I have known for many years acted as follows, when women’s ordination came in in the Anglican Church here in Australia: the mother, very Anglo-Catholic, became a Catholic, as did her son; her daughter instead went Russian Orthodox; and her husband, who had been middle-of-the-road Anglican, stopped going to any church at all. Examples could be multiplied. I feel particularly for those who find their church become unrecognizable, but don’t think they have anywhere to go: they are truly lost, God help them.
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