“I’m Actually Quite Conservative” Bishop Shaw, Mass, Approves Marriage For Gay Couples

Yup
He’s conservative all right.
He hasn’t endorsed or agreed to marry farmers and their
sheep!

YET!

And the beat goes on.

Let’s see, what one allegedly supposedly indicated by one’s attendance at Lambeth was one was with the stated position of the Anglican Communion (1998 I.10). 

So, how’s that working out for ya, Rowan?

Yeah, thought so.  You go keeping the affirming catholic faith so evidenced by your invitees from ECUSA/TEC/GCC.  There’s a new way to be Roaming these days.

Even so, we know that not all are of one mind and that some in good faith will disagree with this decision. Our Anglican tradition makes space for this disagreement and calls us to respect and engage one another in our differences. It is through that tension that we find God’s ultimate will.

Which means those who disagree will be allowed to privately dissent.  They will not however be allowed to act upon that dissent.  The space allowed is only the space to abstain.  Meanwhile, the other side creates irreversible facts on the ground.  The right to abstain does not include the right to refuse rightful authority.  So we have the interesting situation where people are “allowed space” to (say) consider a homosexual bishop a contradiction, but must in any case submit to the authority of that bishop.  Space after all has defined boundaries.  If they don’t like it, they can leave.  Without the property, and to the sound of copious tears from those who remain.  And solemn reassurance to those who depart that the light will always be on should they want to come back.

carl

Well, within TEC, he probably is indeed a conservative insofar as he doesn’t require the groom and groom to wear Che! T-shirts during the sodom…er, solemnization ceremony.

In May of 2004 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court opened civil marriage in our state to same-gender couples. That ruling set up a contradiction between what civil law would allow and what our church’s canons and formulary state SNIP

and the church takes its direction from the state since….?

Yes Carl, it’d be interesting to see if any priests in Shaw’s diocese would be allowed to publicly state their opposition to this innovation. How long would they last? Of course I understand there are probably no such priests willing to do so, but the thought occurred to me nonetheless…

“Yes Carl, it’d be interesting to see if any priests in Shaw’s diocese would be allowed to publicly state their opposition to this innovation. How long would they last? Of course I understand there are probably no such priests willing to do so, but the thought occurred to me nonetheless…”

Oh, I can tell you how it works.  The clergy can publicly state their opposition, but the second that the episcopal snake has a couple of dirty letters from gay couples in a parish complaining about the priest, the priest gets counseled(read:  pressured) that “I really would hate to declare this a “conflicted” parish(read:  and ask for your resignation prior to removing you); so, you either go along to get along and keep your job, thus selling your principles to the highest bidder; or, you leave if you can find another position in a less corrupt diocese. 

Shaw has allowed the gays to rule there(no shock, considering “personal circumstances”)...he won’t even encourage a couple to go down the street and get “solemnized” by another priest in another church who believes in gay “marriage”...trust me, no dissent is allowed, despite the crap on paper that everyone retains the right to refuse any marriage. 

That’s fine…he’s just done wonders for the RC Archdiocese of Boston’s evangelization, not to mention the ACNA churches.

“Christian marriage is a sacramental rite that has evolved in the church, along with confirmation, ordination, penance, and the anointing of the sick, and while it is not necessary for all, it must be open to all as a means of grace and sustenance to our Christian hope”.

Yeah, it’s a “rite”, not a right.  And this assumes that one has the “right” to change the definition of the sacrament of marriage, as it is currently defined(one man, one woman) at will.

That has got to be the most supremely arrogant thing I’ve ever seen, but I’m not surprised. 

“Our clergy have not been allowed to solemnize same-gender marriages, but they have been permitted to bless them after the fact”.

Clergy have still solemnized gay “marriages” in that diocese and not been disciplined for it.

“This provision for generous pastoral response is an allowance and not a requirement; any member of the clergy may decline to solemnize any marriage”.

Yeah, right; until they do and the gays complain.

“And, because The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage in The Book of Common Prayer may not be used for marriages of same-gender couples, we ask that our priests seek out liturgical resources being developed and collected around the church”.

So much for our doctrine being in the prayer book; “we believe as we pray”...just pull any junk service off the internet and use that if you want, no need to use anything authorized…we’re “right” because we have enlightenment, prophecy, and incense and vestments(and we read the Globe and Times!)

“Our Anglican tradition makes space for this disagreement and calls us to respect and engage one another in our differences”.

Please remember that when I call you into my office to pressure, manipulate or skewer you. 

“...God is again blessing our diocese with a great challenge by which we might enter more fully into that ethic of love which Jesus speaks to us through the New Testament”.

Where is it written that sodomy, or the blessing of it, was part of Jesus’s “ethic of love”? 

I think this guy’s judgment has long been detrimentally clouded by too many years of living in that monastery; the activities of which can be imagined but will remain undiscussed. 

Eeeewww…“step into my parlor, said the spider to the fly”...

Passing By, I don’t doubt what you said—that’s why I put my statement the way I did—but am wondering if you have some direct knowledge or firsthand experience in this regard. The way you put it makes me think so. If so, perhaps you could share with the rest of us.

Jeremiah 23:16 (New International Version)
This is what the LORD Almighty says:
“Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you;
they fill you with false hopes.  They speak visions from their own minds, NOT from the mouth of the LORD.

David, what do you want me to share that I haven’t already shared? 

Maybe someone with journalistic credentials should ask Bishop Murdoch about all the shenanigans he saw in that diocese prior to leaving it. 

I do have good information, but people like him have better information than mine(not to mention more).

The church takes its direction from the state since ........ 1533.  Always has. Always will. That’s the nature of thing. It’s called “Protestantism.”

[13] Posted by JPC

The church takes its direction from the state since ........ 1533.  Always has. Always will. That’s the nature of thing. It’s called “Protestantism.”

Of course, all Roman Catholics know that the state is to take direction from the church.  That way the Pope can dispatch an army to kill off the Albigensians for heresy.  Complete with a priori indulgences for the army so it wouldn’t feel ... ahem ... inhibited in the performance of its sanctified pillaging.

We are informed by the texts of the gospels that in this Church and in its power are two swords; namely, the spiritual and the temporal. For when the Apostles say: ‘Behold, here are two swords’ [Lk 22:38] that is to say, in the Church, since the Apostles were speaking, the Lord did not reply that there were too many, but sufficient. Certainly the one who denies that the temporal sword is in the power of Peter has not listened well to the word of the Lord commanding: ‘Put up thy sword into thy scabbard’ [Mt 26:52]. Both, therefore, are in the power of the Church, that is to say, the spiritual and the material sword, but the former is to be administered for the Church but the latter by the Church; the former in the hands of the priest; the latter by the hands of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.

That’s called Unam Sanctam.  And it used to be an infallible declaration.  But it’s not anymore, because, well, history kind of past it by, and the Roman Catholic Church can’t very well have falsified infallible declarations walking around without supervision.  People might start wondering about infallibility.  So Stalin’s airbrush was skillfully applied at the appropriate locations.

That’s called Roman Catholicism.

carl

And it used to be an infallible declaration.

Just curious, Carl [#14], who was it precisely that considered the portion of Unam Sanctam that you quote to be an infallible definition?  (I’m not talking about the final sentence of the bull; I’m talking about the part you quoted.)

The idea that the church and the state are separate and that there can be a stable society which does not share unifying and guiding religious assumptions is rather new,  and I would say that it is an idea which is still being tested,  with mixed results. 

All of the main branches of Christianity, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, have a history of entanglement of church and state.  From the time Christianity became a state religion, rather than a persecuted religion,  there have been at least two strands for dealing with it.  Orthodoxy tended to invest the state with ideas of holiness and to accept state leadership in the church.  Thus, for instance,  the idea that only the emperor can call an ecumenical council.  Thus, “Holy Russia” .  Catholicism tried to keep the state subordinate to the Church and managed this with fair success for a quite a while.  When this came to an end historically, there was a lot of power-and money- grabbing by secular rulers involved,  (England being a prime example) and to some degree sincere religiously motivated Protestants were co-opted by secular powers.  But everyone at this point still believed that the state and everyone in it could only have one religion, that this was necessary to basic social order, and that heresy was therefore dangerous to the state and society.  Punishing, and if necessary killing, heretics was approved by all.  The Albigensians were heretics and they were dangerous to society,  and few people except the Albigensians themselves saw anything wrong with it (and that is not to say that they would not have done likewise if they were in power.)  The soldiers were prayed over and “indulgenced” with the idea that they might die in the process of enforcing the necessary social order, not because they were expected to have pangs of guilt about it. 
I don’t think Calvin felt guilty about burning Servetius, and when Elizabeth had Edmund Campion hung, drawn and quartered,  she shed a tear over it because he was such a promising young man when she had heard him preach at Cambridge,  but she didn’t feel guilty, she felt she was doing her duty as a sovereign.  So,  assume for a minute that it is necessary to execute stubborn heretics.  Would you prefer for the Church to determine which they are and instruct the state to do the job, or would you prefer the state to be deciding issues of religious truth,  with the secular head of state as the head of the church?  Those seemed like the only choices to most people at one time. 
Susan Peterson

As for the infallibility issue,  just to be clear, we aren’t talking about those two cases when papal infallibility was explicitly invoked.  We are talking about the “infallibility of the ordinary magisterium.”  Which means that when the Church teaches officially what the whole church has always taught,  it is teaching what is true.  For instance,  when the Church teaches that women cannot be ordained, it is teaching what the church has always taught, and this teaching is irreformable. 

However, and this really upsets a certain sort of Catholic, there are teachings which seem to the people making them to be accepted by everyone and obvious and which don’t seem to them to be changeable ,  which turn out not to have been so.  I find some of these encyclicals related to the relationship of church and state to fall in that category.  There is truth in them to the degree that they insist that the Church and not the state is the determiner of religious truth,  but the necessity for the state to enforce this has since been called into question.    The fact that such things have changed is why there was an opening for people to contest Humanae Vitae, or why they think they can continue to bring up the issue of the ordination of women.  I believe that these doctrines have long pedigrees into patristic times and ARE true and irreformable, whereas the old idea of the relation between church and state has really been upended by the Decree on Religious Freedom.  This is one of the issues, by the way,  that the SSPX has with Vatican II. They cannot accept the Decree on Religious Freedom as a legitimate development.  It may be that the theological discussions which will be beginning soon with the SSPX will bring about more clarity about what constitutes development of doctrine, and about the development of doctrine in this particular area.  I don’t pretend to have a completely clear understanding of it myself.  I am of my time and believe that freedom is the essential atmosphere for true religious conviction and adherence, and that it is something proper to and required by the very nature of a person.
I am sorry for all the times Christians made martyrs of each other.  But I don’t think one can judge the perpetrators by the understandings of our times. 
Susan Peterson

Passing, (#12) the reason I asked the question was for purposes of documentation. I think everyone—but particularly those still within TEC—benefits when these incidents are posted for all to see. I say that with the awareness that names sometimes have to be changed, etc., in order to do so. Anytime one shares these stories, it shines the light on the blatant hyposcrisy of TEC’s leaders and their “inclusive” b.s. (Just as an FYI, it was this problem which helped me leave TEC—praise God—but it’s good for those who read this site and are still making up their minds.)

[15] Silver Lake Catholic

[W]ho was it precisely that considered the portion of Unam Sanctam that you quote to be an infallible definition?  (I’m not talking about the final sentence of the bull; I’m talking about the part you quoted.)

Eh?  Oh, you mean besides Pope Boniface VIII.

This is revealing however.  First, in the actual technique of air-brushing.  Only certain parts are infallible, you see.  And it should be perfectly obvious that Catholics today would read this document exactly as Catholics did in 1302.  When the Pope actually commanded armies, and had real political power.  It would of course be a mistake to assume that Pope Boniface VIII actually meant what he said.  No, he too, thought that only certain parts were infallible.  How coincidental that he considered only the historically-falsified parts, the ‘embarrassing to modern man’ parts to be fallible.  Of course, what is actually infallible at any given time is something of an enigma.  It’s hard to falsify an enigma.

Second, in the complete disconnect of infallible dogma from the exegesis of Scripture.  Here we have an interpretation of Luke 22:38.  It could be one of the few verses for which RCs have actually issued an infallible interpretation.  Certainly the Pope who issued this proclamation saw it that way.  But moderns are somewhat embarrassed by it.  And so we are left with infallible dogma predicated upon false exegesis of Scripture.  So even if they get the Scripture wrong, they still get the dogma right.

Nice work if you can get it.

carl
who has been out of town for a few days

Carl, 
Are you one of those men who only regards other men as serious opponents in debate?  I did comment about this subject as well.  I commented in a way that I think is expressing a vulnerability of my position, to someone who has shown himself full willing to take advantage of any vulnerability,  and I was expecting you to pounce with glee upon my comment.  But instead you ignore it.  I suppose I should be relieved to be ignored by you. Your hostility towards Catholicism, which you think you understand but don’t, is really quite incredible.

Nevertheless.  Every word of every papal encyclical is not infallible.  If it is infallible, it is because it is a statement of what the whole church has always believed.  In that case it has the “infallibility of the ordinary magisterium.” 
Popes can actually be wrong when they draw a conclusion which seems to them to be a consequence of what the whole church has always believed.  They can be wrong about matters of fact. They can rely on documents which they believe to be genuine but which later proved to be not so, or not written when and by whom they purported to be written by. 

For instance, suppose a Pope were convinced the so called “scientific consensus”  on global warming,  and issued an encyclical urging Catholics to live so as to have a small Carbon footprint?  The general statements in that encyclical, about our stewardship of the earth and so on, would be true, but perhaps some of the specifics would prove to be based on falsified data. 
The only part of this hypothetical encyclical which would turn out to be part of catholic teaching would be the understanding that “subdue the earth” includes caretaking as well as domination.

And yes, it isn’t always clear at the time. 

The way of interpreting the scripture quote about the two swords is metaphorical,  a quite common way of using scripture at the time.  It would not have meant that that was the only acceptable way to understand the quote.  It isn’t an “infallible interpretation.”  The Pope who used it seems to have thought it was a valid use of the passage; I doubt he thought of his interpretation as becoming part of the content of the faith. 

Catholics accept these teachings, except insofar as they are part of or clearly derived from the deposit of faith,  with the respectful and dutiful attitude of sons of the church,  but not with divine faith.

I am falling asleep over my computer.  Perhaps someone can state all this in a clearer way. 
Susan Peterson

Papal Bulls aren’t usually seen to be infallible. That doesn’t mean they claim no authority, of course.

My interest is slightly piqued by this - is there a difference between the magisterial reformation and the sixteenth century catholics on duty of the Magistrate in relation to the church? If anything, the magisterial reformers are happier with the Magistrate (Monarch/Prince) assuming jurisdiction that until then had been thought to belong to the Church (such as appointing bishops).

Carl [19], I think its beyond serious debate that, apart from its final sentence, Unam Sanctam does not meet the criteria of infallibility set down by the First Vatican Council, and reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council. And I don’t hear you saying that it does.

What you do seem to be saying is that in its entirety Unam Sanctam is infallible in the Catholic understanding because Boniface VIII personally believed that it was. That would logically imply that Boniface was in practice employing criteria of infallibility broader than that those of Vatican I or Vatican II; but that for some reason he didn’t wish to make public (a) his belief that Unam Sanctam was infallible; or (b) the reasons he judged Unam Sanctam to be infallible; or (c) what his criteria of infallibility were. But the Church’s Magisterium doesn’t function that way.  By its nature the Magisterium functions publicly. Boniface’s hypothetical occult dogmatic theories about infallibility cannot be set up against the public teaching of two ecumenical councils.

[20] eulogos

Are you one of those men who only regards other men as serious opponents in debate?

That is really quite unfair.  I got home at 1:30 yesterday afternoon after seven hours of traveling to an impending blizzard (shoveled out twice yesterday and will do so again in a few minutes), children who wanted my attention, and a crashed hard drive in the computer I normally use.  When I travel I usually don’t have access to the internet, and so I can’t post.  I didn’t spend much time on the this thread because frankly I thought it was close to dead.  I simply wanted statements about Unam Sanctam placed on the record.  I wasn’t even sure I would get responses.  Given my time constraints, I focused most of my efforts yesterday on a thread at Fulcrum that I started.

I did not intend to slight you.  I simply triaged the threads and made the decisions I felt best.

carl

Driver8, the “Magisterial Reformers” is not a phrase dealing with the attitudes of the Reformers to the magistrate or sovereign.  Rather, it is a phrase denoting the leading reformers - Luther and Calvin, and their close associates.  They were the ones who “mastered” the Reformation - analyzing the theological problems in medieval Roman Catholicism, showing the clear teaching of Scripture, and answering the objections that might be raised to their teachings.  They certainly could differ from one another in some areas (what goes on in Communion most notably), but they led the Reformation, and other theologians followed and supported them.

I know.

I specifically said the Magisterial Reformers because I intended to exclude the Radical Reformation (that is the anabpatist tradition) from my point.

RE: “Are you one of those men who only regards other men as serious opponents in debate?”

Yes, indeed.

It’s outrageous, frankly.

But isn’t that just like a Truly Reformed person who no doubt wants *all* women to submit rather than merely his poor wife.

My guess is that the man does not even have a Christmas tree up.  No doubt does not believe in Christmas as its antecedents were pagan, or some such.

Or it is all too merry for him.

But that’s a distraction from the main issue which is that Carl refuses to argue with women, thinking himself to be above that.

Sorry - you seemed to be thinking that “magisterial” and “magistrate” were not only closely related but in the phrase “magisterial Reformers” referred to the Reformers attitudes towards civil government.

Earl Fox once said that the word “religion” comes out of the same latin root as “ligament.”  The “lig” of both refers to a binding together - and “religion” is a belief that ties a culture together.  I do not know if that is etymologically true, but it does seem that the more a culture has in common with regard to theological beliefs and expectations, the more stable that culture is.  There may be a lot of arguments over spiritual matters in a religiously uniform culture - but these will be on tertiary matters for the most part. A pluralistic society may have far fewer religious arguments, but it will also have a big problem with meaninglessness and materialism.  Or so it seems to me as I look at the world…

I simply triaged the threads…

I’m not concerned about his attitudes to women or men. I am in turmoil that anyone would feel it acceptable to use “triage” as a verb in this context. Total depravity indeed…

It’s used in the Thirty Nine Articles and I used it as a short way of referring to the various “secular” authorities - monarchs, princes, nobles etc.. to whom the reformers appealed for help. This is common in reformation literature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magisterial_Reformation

[28] Sarah

But isn’t that just like a Truly Reformed person who no doubt wants *all* women to submit rather than merely his poor wife.

My meek submissive wife just brought me some Hot Chocolate after I came in from shoveling.  Life is good.  The city is shut down for the blizzard. 

carl
who thinks ‘triage’ is a perfectly fine verb.  My wife even once used ‘L’Hospital’ as a verb. 

Professor:  “How do you determine the limit of a function as x approaches zero if the function is undefined at zero?”

My Wife:  “You L’Hospital it.”

Carl,

I’ve used the gerund form frequently. I didn’t realize there was a debate… but I’m fairly certain that triage is acceptable as a verb. I thought the original french word was primarily a verb.

Sorry… the gerund form of l’Hôpital

One can’t judge what is right simply from inspecting what is acceptable. (Carl of all people should know that!)

Nor can you judge what is right from what the French say.

But you’ve got to start somewhere.