Duncan warns the English

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=65333

[Church Times] 24 Oct 2008--THE Rt Revd Bob Duncan, the former Bishop of Pittsburgh in the Episcopal Church in the United States, deposed from holy orders by the Presiding Bishop last month for “abandoning communion” after his diocese realigned itself with the Province of the Southern Cone, has warned that English traditionalists could find themselves similarly threatened (News, 10 October), .

At a press conference in London last Friday, Bishop Duncan said that the Episcopal Church in the US had treated him “unjustly and uncan­on­ically”. He had been deposed, two weeks after his diocese’s vote to leave the Episcopal Church, under a canon designed to remove those who had become RCs or Pres­byterians or who had lost their faith. But he expected to be re-elected by the diocese at a Convention on 7 November. “I will have been both the 7th Bishop of Pittsburgh and the 8th Bishop of Pittsburgh, and I didn’t die in between.”

Many English bishops had refused to accept his deposition as valid, including the bishops of Blackburn, Chester, Exeter, Rochester, and Win­chester. They signed a public letter to say that they believed he was still “a bishop in good standing in the Anglican Communion”.

The Presiding Bishop in Jerusalem & the Middle East, the Most Revd Mouneer Anis, had compared Bishop Duncan’s treatment to that of St Athanasius, exiled from his see three times during his contention with the Arians.