Rob Eaton: Schofield Rumor is False

Psalm 57

I reiterate this:

Bishop Schofield is an AVOWED celibate - he has taken orders for this.  He once told me that if you are called to be celibate you know - God calls you to it.  It is his. 

This kind of tactic is just what we are learning to expect.  The other side isn’t using the same rule book as we are call to - the Holy Bible.

Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! 23 Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven; for so their fathers did to the prophets
The Revised Standard Version. 1971 (Lk 6:22).

Another example of the Jesus way of looking at things. May the Lord bless Bishop Schofield mightily, for he is definitely being reviled in some quarters!

Greg,
Thanks for giving this headline status.  Just one clarification.  I didn’t say that HOB/D is where the whole thing started, but that is where the last instance of it appeared (until Lisa) with some guys from ECR asking about it, and when I stepped in to squash it.  I perhaps didn’t make it clear that these guys heard it from somewhere else and chose the HOB/D to state what they had heard as truth.
One way or the other, this rumor goes back a ways.  Lakeland Two’s emphasis is correct, that +JDS took a vow of celibacy, and that many, many years ago.  He has not broken that vow.
What a difference from GL, a seminary classmate and who was actually a self-avowed gay man.  Four weeks into the beginning of his first year he shared with me that he, too, had taken a vow of celibacy to satisfy his bishop’s requirements not to be active sexually for postulancy and sponsorship in seminary, and then ordination.  He then went on to say, “But if I find the right person then that won’t stop me from having a relationship with him.”

What you wrote Rob Eaton+ is really depressing, a sign of our time, but depressing.

I have a friend who attended undergrad at Asbury College, which appearently has a no alcohol policy, when asked if she’d return to teach now that she’s finshed with her thesis, her reply was that she like wine too much and that it was a contract not a covenant. I think she understands life better than your classmate or most of society. The difference between a contract and convenant, also if she didn’t agree, not trying to demand they change their understanding just to accomodate her.

We’ve forgotten as a whole what a vow means. Marriage should never be as this classmate, ones of convenience. Maybe I’m widening this debate too broad, but I do feel as a whole we’ve cheapened what a vow means. Bp. Schofield seems to be a great example of perseverance.

May the Lord bless Bp. Schofield with wisdom, love, & stregth. May the Lord bring discipline on any who make baseless accusations that they learn His ways.

I’m with Hosea.  Vows are, indeed, taken very lightly in today’s society.  IMO it started with the breaking of wedding vows, but has now spread to religious ones as well.

In olden times the penalties for oath-breaking were severe, and anyone branded an “oath-breaker” was reviled and outcast from society.  Now even vows made before God are casually tossed aside if they conflict with an individual’s desires.

Elizabet Kaeton is now claiming that her sources on Schofield are “solid”.  Sounds like that revisionist who was spreading gossip about alleged polygamous African bishops: his sources were likewise supposedly unimpeachable, but he wouldn’t name them or produce any evidence when challenged.

I’m still not getting how this matter, whether true or false, is any business of Fox’s or Kaeton’s.  Their behavior—not Schofield’s—is absolutely despicable.

St.Anonymous,
They keep proving Romans 1:18-32 to be true by their actions,in this case 1:29-30, and the terms malice,haughty,boastful,gossips and inventors of evil to be apt descriptions of their behaviour.

À propos St. Anonymous’s comment above, I submit the following from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons.  Thomas More, in prison and in danger of death for refusing to take an oath affirming King Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, responds to his daughter’s plea to “say the words of the oath and in your heart think otherwise”:

“When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self
in his own hands. Like water. [He cups his hands] And if
he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself
again.  Some men aren’t capable of this, but I’d be loathe
to think your father one of them.”

May we be likewise so loathe.