Monday, November 26, 2007

Who Are the Schismatics?

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7136

[Virtue Online] 26.11.07--Following upon the conference of the Anglican Network in Canada recently held in Burlington Ontario, the Right Reverend Dr. Michael Ingham, Bishop of New Westminster, has warned that 'full-blown schism' has fallen upon the Anglican Church of Canada. Dr. Ingham has sent threatening letters to retired Bishop Donald Harvey, who has left the Anglican Church of Canada and found a new episcopal home under the South American Primate, Gregory Venables, to stay off his turf (not to ordain desperately-needed new priests for conservative parishes in New Westminster), to the potential ordinands (asserting that only his ordinations are recognized in the Anglican Church of Canada and, speaking imperially, the world-wide Anglican Communion), and to conservative priests in his Diocese (not to support any irregular ordinations).

In the various versions of the Bishop's warnings published by friendly media, little mention has been made that most of the global Anglican Communion consider Dr. Ingham himself a schismatic, and that many of the large national churches of Anglicanism, especially in Africa, Asia and South America have severed or suspended their communion with the angry Bishop. In their opinion, Dr. Ingham is the one who has broken with the clear teaching of Anglicanism, as expressed in Lambeth conferences and in the conciliar deliberations of the leaders of Anglican national churches, the Primates - most notably in the Windsor Report and its process of discernment and discipline, which Dr. Ingham and his Diocese have defied. Dr. Ingham has earned for himself a standing of revisionist leadership within the Anglican Communion, championing not only the gay rights agenda, attending supportively the consecration of the gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, but also a religious pluralism which sees salvation through Christ as but one of the ways to God, and a sexual morality which finds Eastern spirituality offering better guidance for sexual expression than traditional Christian teaching on chastity and marriage.

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