How Non-Jurors Get Made

http://cariocaconfessions.blogspot.com/2008/03/how-non-jurors-get-made.html

[Confessions of a Carioca] 7 Mar 2008--In 1688, in a (relatively) bloodless coup, the British parliament ousted King James II for his Roman proclivities, imported a Dutch prince, William of Orange, and installed him as King William III. Several bishops, along with a few hundred clergy and laity, while not particularly supportive of James, believed themselves morally bound by an oath of loyalty to him, and refused to take such an oath to William. For exercising the courage of their convictions, the bishops were deprived of their sees and their livings and many were reduced to poverty. This group became known as Non-Jurors. For a time, they were a sort of diminutive "shadow" Church of England, and the bishops even consecrated successors to themselves. After about a century, it was all rendered moot by the death of the Stuart pretender.

From a safe distance now, the Non-Jurors are often held up as models of courageous integrity. They agreed that it was a good thing for the realm to be rid of James, and that William and Mary would make splendid regents. They just didn't think William should be made monarch. That little principled stand was a career-ender for them. Unemployment and loss of status were no more attractive or tolerable in the seventeenth century than today.

There's a new group of Non-Jurors in the process of formation even as I write. They are former clergy and laity of the Diocese of San Joaquin. Their principled stand places them between the "rock" of their former bishop, whom they have loved and served loyally, but whom they cannot in good conscience follow to the Province of the Southern Cone, and the "hard place" of the non-canonical rump "remaining" Diocese of San Joaquin, which they cannot in good conscience join because it represents the raw exercise of naked illicit power by the Presiding Bishop, and because to do so would compromise their oath of loyalty to the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church.