1st openly gay American Anglican (Episcopal) Bishop elected

[Yorick]

Originally posted by Timber Loftis: I wonder exactly HOW high a standard we hold our religious leaders to. Hmmm... let's see, pedophile priests and the church REFUSES TO NAME THEM. Ha! High standards indeed. The very system they're offending protects them.

And you think this counters my point? Paedophile Priests are among the most despised people in society! By 'we' I do not mean simply the Catholic Church Timber! For starters, unlike Catholicism, most Christian denominations allow their ministers to marry.

Secondly, you are condemning Priests for protecting their comrades from further humiliation, yet in any other profession, protecting a fallen friend could be honourable. However wrong they may be in not naming PPs you seem to be setting a higher standard for them than anyone else.

That is precisely what I'm exploring.

Would you name your partner if he was your best friend, and yet committed a crime that would cause him to lose everything? You may do so, but would you seek to help him in any way, or join the chorus of those who deemed your friend an animal worse than manure.

[ 08-06-2003, 03:37 PM: Message edited by: Yorick ]

[Yorick]

Originally posted by Chewbacca: They also held the opinion that the Holy Spirit and community had more weight than scripture when deciding church policy and that scripture is widely open to interpretation.

That is an important consideration. His own people under him have voted him in. He has many supporters. Presumeably he impacts their life positively.

[johnny]

originally posted by Yorick Would you name your partner if he was your best friend, and yet committed a crime that would cause him to lose everything?

If it involved paedophilia, yes, without one single doubt. I might even have my way with him first before turning him in.

[Timber Loftis]

Originally posted by johnny: quote: originally posted by Yorick Would you name your partner if he was your best friend, and yet committed a crime that would cause him to lose everything?

If it involved paedophilia, yes, without one single doubt. I might even have my way with him first before turning him in. [/QUOTE]Ditto and ditto. [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img] I also might punch him in the nose. But, I get the point. In cases less shocking the pedophelia, I may try to protect my friend. Not because he's a professional comrade, but because he's my friend. As well, I would protect those who were accused but had not yet been found guilty (as I admit is the case with some priests -- with the added layer of convolution that the church WON'T investigate in some instances also duly noted). Anyway, as I feel Kobe Bryant's identity ought to be kept a secret as much as the golddigger's -- at least let's find out if he's guilty before we ruin his life.

Anyway, you may have picked the wrong question to ask a lawyer -- like guppie-sharks, we eat our own at every available instance.

But, I wasn't attacking anyone or any idea so much as trying to input thoughts into the discourse for consideration.

[*\Conan/*]

Yorick, Yes it will divide. No other way it seems.

Great poll and as always I respect your language and writing, all of you blow me away with great responses. Here is an article that may surprise some about who was a first in DC.

All God's Children
As Episcopal Leaders Debate Gays and the Church, One Washington Parish Already Has Its Answer
By Jennifer Frey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 5, 2003; Page C01


It's Sunday morning at All Souls Memorial Episcopal Church in Woodley Park. The turnout is decent for August, when the choir takes a break and Sunday school is closed. A mother in the back row whispers to her small, restless children. A couple up front are celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary. An 81-year-old woman leans on her cane as she prays. She's been coming here for 50 years, and had all three of her children confirmed at this altar.




In a middle pew is a couple who drove up from Virginia Beach to attend services with their son, who is openly gay and planning to join the church. Across the aisle is a gay couple who wear rings as a symbol of their commitment, and lean into each other sometimes as they sing from the hymnal. In the aisle, a mother rocks a little girl in her arms, trying to shush her.

The Mass, as always, is a formal one. The rector, and the congregation, feel strongly about that. They believe in sticking to the liturgy, in having the incense, the bells, the kneeling and the gentle music from the pipe organ. It is a traditional church. Founded in 1911 and established by the Episcopal Diocese of Washington in 1913, All Souls was once known as one of the most conservative Episcopal churches in the District, its rector legendary for his strict positions on church and social issues.

Things are different now. Different, and the same. When the Rev. John David van Dooren took over All Souls 11 years ago, he was, he believes, the first openly gay Episcopal priest in the District. And right now in Minneapolis at the Episcopal Church's annual national convention, the major topic of debate is whether to confirm the church's first openly gay bishop, the Rev. V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Whether to sanction gay unions also is expected to be on the agenda. The vote on Robinson -- postponed yesterday after allegations of past inappropriate touching surfaced -- is such a divisive issue that conservative bishops and parishes have threatened to split away from the church if he is confirmed.

Van Dooren is following the news closely. He knows his own appointment was a risk for his parish. Beloved by the community when he served, closeted as a curate there, he had been invited back to serve as rector -- to a church dwindling in membership, at risk of closure by the diocese, in need of revitalization. His invitation came with a special request from Roy Woodall, then the senior warden. Woodall wanted van Dooren to be honest with the church vestry about his personal life.

"You look at what they founded this church on way back when," Woodall says, "and what they said was it was to be a church for all souls."

It was time for van Dooren to finally put those words to the test.

"It's not an issue here," van Dooren says. He is speaking of the debate inside the Episcopal Church over homosexuality -- over the validity of gay bishops, gay unions, gay marriages. The latter issue is one of current national debate outside the church: Last week alone, both President Bush and the Vatican weighed in on gay marriage, both opposed, and the Senate is expected to address the issue when it returns from summer recess.

"A lot of us can't understand why there would even be a debate, because we see it work," van Dooren says. "All the people who say, 'Oh, the church would plummet, the church wouldn't work,' well, we see that's just not the case. This is a vital church. The love of the Lord is just alive and well here."

To illustrate, van Dooren, 43, gives a visitor a tour of the photographs -- taken by him -- that line the rectory hallway. There is the mixed-race couple he wed early in his tenure. The white gay couple who came to him to baptize their two adopted African American children. The children gathered together at Sunday school, a program he instituted. The elderly, pearls-wearing woman who came up to van Dooren after he became rector and told him, bluntly, "I think you all are nicer than normal people." She has since passed away, but the memory still makes him laugh. "It was her way," he says, "and I thanked her very much."

It worked from the beginning. Surprising, but true. Even van Dooren had had his doubts. Speaking to then-Bishop Ronald Hayward Haines when he first took the post, he remembers hearing support but wariness: "He doubted it could work because of the church's conservative history -- that while the people might not be there still, history lives." (The current bishop, the Right Rev. John Bryson Chane, could not be reached for comment, but he spoke in support of Robinson's nomination at the national convention last week.)

Of course, a few congregants had concerns. One member of the vestry seemed dead-set against it, Woodall recalls, but eventually "she became one of his biggest supporters." A young man in his thirties told van Dooren that while he supported him as an individual, he felt that he must leave the church.

The rest embraced him.

"We loved him," says Regina Dading, the 81-year-old with the cane, who attended the church for 50 years but didn't "join" until van Dooren urged her to.

And so van Dooren moved into the rectory with his partner, Gary (the couple asked that his last name not be used for professional privacy reasons), with whom he has shared his life since 1987.

"I think it helped, a great deal, that they knew me first," says van Dooren. "I had been a curate, so they knew who I was. So even the people, some of the older ladies wouldn't necessarily have been for it, on paper -- they loved me."

The membership grew. With fewer than 50 active members when he took over in 1992 (Masses sometimes drew a mere dozen), the church now boasts more than 400, and regularly has 250 attend each Sunday's high service. About a quarter of the congregation is gay, van Dooren estimates. Urban revitalization resulted in more young families living in the District, and many of them, like the Prestons (Stephen, Mary and children Julia and Collett) or the Motturs (Al, Elizabeth, Tommy and Caroline), joined and brought children to the fledgling Sunday school.

"It's where we want to raise our children," says Elizabeth Mottur, who has moved twice since joining All Souls but continues to commute to the church, now from Bethesda. "You want them to belong to an accepting church. They can see heterosexual relationships because they live that, at home, with their parents. They need to see this."

One couple, the Vances, grew disillusioned with their old church for its rigid beliefs, particularly on homosexuality, and switched to All Souls, because, Landis Vance says, "I was looking for a diverse, accepting church and had two friends who told me I should come here."

A couple looking for a church after the trauma of 9/11 called one in their Bethesda neighborhood to ask if they would be welcome as open lesbians -- and the priest directed them to All Souls.

The entire time, van Dooren made it his guiding principle that the church would be rooted in Christ, that his sexual orientation would not be a diversion to the church's mission. He did not want All Souls to become a "gay church," but rather a church welcoming to gays, just as he was not a "gay priest," but a priest who happened to be gay.

Still, issues come up. Partners Don Harrell, 38, and Chris Locklear, 35, joined because of van Dooren's leadership, and felt comfortable going to him two years ago to discuss finding a way to recognize their union inside the church's walls.

At first, van Dooren said no. Not because he did not believe in gay unions. Far from it. Every time he performs a wedding, he says, he thinks to himself that there should be a way for gays to have that same source of strength and commitment in the church. But he didn't see a way under church doctrine.

Harrell and Locklear persisted, so van Dooren went to his bishops and said: "Tell me what I can do." What followed was a delicate attempt to craft a service that did not violate Episcopal principles yet gave Harrell and Locklear the satisfaction that their love and commitment had been witnessed before God. Language was crucial: There could be no talk of a "wedding." This would not be a "marriage" with all that the word entails, both legally and spiritually, but rather a "blessing of a union."

On Aug. 31, 2002, Harrell and Locklear stood at the altar of All Souls and exchanged rings and promises in front of 150 witnesses. In front of van Dooren. In front of God.

Asked how he reconciled his misgivings, van Dooren says: "When my own parishioners come to me and say, 'I have this loving relationship. We want to live in monogamy. We want to live in faith. You can bless my house. You can bless my car, but you can't bless this commitment?,' how can I say no?"

Reconciliation did not come easy in van Dooren's own life. Raised in a conservative Anglican family in a conservative community, van Dooren knew he was gay from his earliest memories but didn't accept it.

"I just always knew that it was not accepted and I never was exposed to a book or anything that said it was," he says. "So I grew up with this secret that was so difficult. I thought I would work it out somehow, either through marriage or whatever I would do."

He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1982, and decided that the church would give him his answer. He enrolled in the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, determined "to debate myself out" of the idea that he was homosexual. At one point, he even decided to enter the monastery, convinced that homosexuality was God's way of calling him to celibacy.

Eventually, he had a complete crisis of faith.

"It just, in a sense, toppled," he says. "Some of my thoughts were fairly . . . conservative, and my house of cards fell. What was left wasn't much, but it was authentic, and I built back from there."

Van Dooren emerged from that dark year at peace with the idea that he had "given myself wrong information in my mind, that God could love me, and I could serve God and give my life to God as a gay man."

His earlier doubts, though, left him with an awkward understanding of those who stand against who and what he is -- including his own mother. Closeted through the 1980s, he met Gary, then at Bolling Air Force Base, at a party in 1987. Gary was, in van Dooren's words, "my soul mate." Eventually they moved in together. And every time van Dooren's mother came to visit, Gary moved out. (His father died in 1985, unaware of his son's sexual orientation.) Still, his mom suspected, and one day she confronted him. The result was heartbreaking to him.

"My own mother is a conservative Christian, and when she found out about this 13 years ago, she said, 'I will never go to your home, I will never go to your church -- no true Christian would,' " he says. "And she never has. We've maintained a relationship, a very loving one, but obviously it's very limited because she can never hear about my church or my life with my partner, which pretty much makes up a lot of my life."

As sad as the situation makes van Dooren, he sees it as a constant reminder of what rests in the minds and hearts of those who still cannot accept a gay priest, or the idea of a gay union sanctioned by either his government or his church.

"They don't wake up in the morning and say, 'I think I will be bigoted today,' " he says. "They, such as my mother, truly have a conviction that they are on God's side. But I know what I know what I know, that they are wrong on this issue. Because I see the evidence otherwise. I see the evidence in my heart and life.

"I look at my community," he adds, "and I just think: If they can just see this."

It is coffee hour after Sunday services, and in a downstairs room the congregation is gathered, chatting, smiling, sharing with their community and offering up hosannas for the man they lovingly refer to as "John David." Harrell and Locklear are talking of their upcoming one-year anniversary. Another member, Mark Hoffmann, who joined the church with his partner seven years ago, is making arrangements to drive one of the elderly congregants to her doctor's appointment the next morning.

Denisse Prado, an 18-year-old acolyte, gushes about how the church has raised $36,000 to help her enroll in Catholic University next fall. Tommy and Caroline Mottur are twisting themselves around their mother's legs as she tries to ladle punch.

"How much of this is John David?" Elizabeth Mottur says, repeating a question. "It's hard to separate All Souls from him."


© 2003 The Washington Post Company



Conan

[Donut]

Originally posted by Yorick: The Episcopal/Anglican Church has no connection to the Pope however. It is part of the "Church of England" founded when Henry XIII of England decided to ignore the Popes refusals to marry him to his second? wife. So the English Church broke away, experienced some reforms and spread into the English speaking world. It became the "Anglican Church" everywhere but America where is is called "Episcopal" and I believe Scotland, which calls it the "Church of Scotland" .

I'm sorry Hugh - I just can't resist this. Did I fall asleep and miss 5 Kings of England called Henry??? Or did you miv up your Roman numerals?



BTW - just to add to the fire, the gay Bishop has two children from his marriage.

And - just to add a secular twist. The Episcopal Church were last night expected to approve the drafting of a church service to bless homosexual couples. This is in direct defiance of Bush's announcement last week that he was against all forms of gay marriage and that he had asked Federal lawyers to explore ways of changing the Constitution to outlaw the practice throughout America.

Yes - read it again "change the Consitution" what would the Founding Fathers have to say about that? The same Constitution that is set in stone to allow shooty things is actually somewhat malleable when dealing with a few poofs.

[Moiraine]

Originally posted by Yorick: And you think this counters my point? Paedophile Priests are among the most despised people in society! By 'we' I do not mean simply the Catholic Church Timber! For starters, unlike Catholicism, most Christian denominations allow their ministers to marry. Secondly, you are condemning Priests for protecting their comrades from further humiliation, yet in any other profession, protecting a fallen friend could be honourable. However wrong they may be in not naming PPs you seem to be setting a higher standard for them than anyone else. That is precisely what I'm exploring. Would you name your partner if he was your best friend, and yet committed a crime that would cause him to lose everything? You may do so, but would you seek to help him in any way, or join the chorus of those who deemed your friend an animal worse than manure.

Well, seems to me that yes priests should be measured to a higher standard that the average person - as should any person whose profession deals with directly influencing other people's lives. Like teachers, politicians, ...

What also bothers me is that when homosexuality is mentioned, a short time later someone mentions paedophilia. These are two widely different things : one is a relationship between consenting adults, the other is taking advantage of a child's vulnerability and causing hurt.

If a friend of mine committed paedophilia, I would have no choice but turn him in, to protect children from further harm. This does NOT mean I would let him down and despise him though - if he was my friend to begin with, I consider I have a duty to help him. I would try as best I could to understand and comfort him - but I could NOT let children further suffer in the name of friendship.

[ 08-07-2003, 06:28 AM: Message edited by: Moiraine ]

[Mouse]

Originally posted by Donut: The same Constitution that is set in stone to allow shooty things is actually somewhat malleable when dealing with a few poofs.

Donut, you have just posted the funniest sentence I have ever seen here and caused my colleagues to wonder why I have just dissolved into helpless laughter.

Keep up the good work [img]graemlins/biglaugh.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]

[Sir Taliesin]

Originally posted by Donut: The Episcopal Church were last night expected to approve the drafting of a church service to bless homosexual couples. This is in direct defiance of Bush's announcement last week that he was against all forms of gay marriage and that he had asked Federal lawyers to explore ways of changing the Constitution to outlaw the practice throughout America. Yes - read it again "change the Consitution" what would the Founding Fathers have to say about that? The same Constitution that is set in stone to allow shooty things is actually somewhat malleable when dealing with a few poofs.

Bush is pandering to the Falwell/Robertson wing of the Republican Party again. The election season started this spring and he needs to shore up his base. While the Constitution isn't written in stone, it's incredibly hard to change. Here's what has to happen.

Article V of The Constitution of the United states of America

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

I don't think for a moment that you could get a 2/3 majority in either house to go along with it. The Republicians hold only a narrow majority in both houses, and don't think Bush could get all the Republican Representatives and Senators to vote for such a ban either.

The only route I could see such an amendment passing would be via the State Legislatures and your talking YEARS for that to happen.