episcopal bishop Defrocks priest Over homosexual Ordination

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Now a bishop, he took a winding path to Orthodox Church
Tikhon drifted away from the Episcopalianism of his boyhood, but found faith in a Chicago church. Philadelphia Inquirer - Philadelphia,PA,USA

David O'Reilly is an Inquirer staff writer

A curious thing happened to Marc Mollard on his way to veterinary school.

He decided to join the Orthodox Church.

Then he entered an Orthodox monastery, where his spirituality earned him the admiration of church leaders.

Now he is the newly ordained Bishop Tikhon, head of the Diocese of Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania of the Orthodox Church in America.

Nothing in his appearance suggests the middle-class Franklin and Marshall College undergraduate he once was. His graying beard flows to mid-chest. His floor-length robes are solemn and black. He carries a staff and wears a draped kamelaukion - a tall, brimless cap - as a sign that he is celibate.

Yet he is just 39 - young enough to remember what it was like to be young and searching. And he hopes his journey into Orthodoxy might encourage other Americans to follow.

"People today are looking for something real - for deeper reality and the meaning of life," he said during a recent visit to St. Stephen pro-Cathedral in the Northeast. "I was looking as well, and I think I was led providentially to Orthodoxy."

Two decades earlier, however, such notions as divine providence were not even on his radar screen. As an undergraduate he had "drifted away" from the Episcopalianism of his Reading boyhood. "I saw religion as unintellectual," he admitted with a shrug.

But as his education progressed, he "began to meet very intelligent people who were religious." This, he said, "brought me out of that false idea many young people have" about religion.

By the time he graduated from Franklin and Marshall in 1988, he had abandoned his pursuit of veterinary medicine - "I discovered I was not a scientist" - and found himself "searching for the fullness of life."

He might have returned to the Episcopal Church USA; his mother, Elizabeth, a longtime reporter for the Reading Eagle, was also an ordained Episcopal priest. (His father, Francois, was an indifferent Roman Catholic.) But Mollard wanted something old, rich and rigorous - what he now calls "the true faith."

Orthodoxy, with its sacred icons, ancient traditions and long, luminous liturgies, might have seemed obvious, but it struck him then as an "ethnic" church, home to Serbians and Armenians and Greeks and Russians, perhaps, but just too foreign for a 22-year-old kid from coal country.

Then, a few months later, he was in Chicago and a friend - who was also seeking a church - said to him, "Why don't we see what the Orthodox Church is about?" Mollard agreed and "took out a phone book" to find one.

A little later they found themselves at the ornate, candle-lit Church of SS. Peter and Paul just outside the city.

They stood through the Divine Liturgy, which lasted more than two hours and included a consecration ritual performed by priests behind drawn curtains.

"What immediately impressed me was a theology that was profound and beautiful," he said. "I discovered in Orthodoxy fundamental truths that were not Russian or Greek, preserved in spite of the ethnic aspects."

He soon found himself drawn to the Orthodox Church in America, which in 1970 had shed its original name - the Russian Orthodox Church in America - in hopes of inculturating more fully in the United States. (In 1970, the OCA - which until then had been a mission of the Russian church - was also granted autonomous status as national church, in part because relations with the mother church in then-Communist Russia had grown so tenuous.)

He was accepted into the faith in 1989, and that year began studies at St. Tikhon Seminary in South Canaan, Pa. One year later, he entered the monastic community at St. Tikhon Monastery as a novice.

In 1995, he was tonsured as a monk and ordained as priest and given the single name Tikhon, after the Russian Orthodox patron saint of North America. In 1998, he made an igumen, similar to the rank of prior in the Western churches, and in 2000 was made an archimandrite, or abbot.

On Oct. 29, 2005, he was ordained bishop of the 10,000-member Diocese of Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania, which includes Wilmington.

He said he was too new in the role of bishop to have devised any bold new ventures for his diocese, which has about 40 parishes, including 12 in Philadelphia.

He agrees that Orthodoxy - which is strictly traditional on matters of sexual morality and scriptural truth - can seem like "strong tea" to Christians raised in modernized denominations.

"If people want watered-down tea, Orthodoxy is not for them. But Christ is asking us to change our whole lives, and there is a richness here that offers a lot for those who desire to embrace it."

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http://directionstoorthodoxy.org/mod/ne ... le_id=6973

Church is treating us like children says bishop
Number: 5805 Date: Feb 3 Church of England Newspaper

By Michael Brown

ANGLICANS opposed to women bishops are being treated like children, it was claimed last weekend. The accusation was levelled by the Bishop of Fulham, the Rt Rev John Broadhurst, at an upbeat and enthusiastic rally in London organised by Forward in Faith, the traditionalists’ body.

The organisation is demanding the creation of a third province if women are given mitres. The rally, in Central Hall, Westminster, on Saturday, was packed to capacity with more than 2,000 traditionalists gathered in advance of next week’s General Synod which will debate the Guildford report. Bishop Broadhurst, Forward in Faith chairman, spoke of his “sadness” that the movement had not been consulted by the Guildford working party as the group worked on its report on women in the episcopacy.

To enthusiastic applause, he said: “We were never consulted. We were just told what was available. That is rather like a child being summoned by his father to the study in some Victorian melodrama and being told that it had been decided that he would go to boarding school. “Have we no opinion? Have we no voice? Are we children to be decided for? Or are we Christian brothers and sisters to be listened to, heard and attended to? “This kind of dialogue will not do. It is extraordinary that Christians can think and behave in such a way. I don’t behave that way with my own children and grandchildren so why should other people assume it is correct to deal with us in that way? It will not do.” Bishop Broadhurst said liberalism had reared its ugly head in the Church of England. The debates on sexuality, on marriage, on the uniqueness of Christ, had undermined not only the Church but the Anglican Communion generally.

The average age of clergy was higher, the number of clergy lower and the number of communicants lower. Easter, Christmas and average Sunday attendances had all fallen and electoral rolls had declined. But the number of parishes petitioning against women priests was “continually growing in spite of quite severe pressure in some dioceses to stop parishes petitioning,” he claimed. And the provincial episcopal visitors — the “flying bishops” — had established themselves as guardians of the faith “and we have in a real sense become a people with our own bishops, a people with real life, a people with growth,” said Bishop Broadhurst. • Women priests and Forward in Faith clergy will pray together today at a vigil in Manchester Cathedral in a bid to build bridges ahead of next week’s Synod debates on women bishops.

The Rev Cherry Vann, the Bishop of Manchester’s adviser on women in ministry, said: “We need to value each other as people. This issue isn’t going away — and it has the potential to rob the Church of its energy and focus.” The Rev Simon Killwick, chairman of the FiF chapter said: “It’s important to be able to speak to each other face to face as friends rather than through megaphones across the divide.”

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Bishops fear over clergy burnout threat
Number: 5805 Date: Feb 3 Church of England Newspaper

By Michael Brown
and Jonathan Wynne-Jones

CLERGY are working too hard and more of them could find their marriages breaking down as a result, a bishop has warned. The Bishop of Hulme, the Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, is so concerned at the potential “burnout” of priests and the effects on their families that he has called for a national debate on their plight.

In an article published in this month’s edition of CRUX, the Manchester diocesan magazine, he said that clergy have not got the “life/work balance” right. Last week, a survey revealed that more than half of clergy wives have suffered from work overload, but the Bishop’s comments highlight the challenges faced by the clergy family. “I know some clergy who never take holidays, are not happy about leaving their church to other priests’ care. And I know some clergy families who feel they always come second to the job and suffer as a result.” Bishop Lowe continued: “Clergy marriages are not supposed to break down or go through choppy waters. Clergy children shouldn’t make demands on their parents that take them away from the parish – the excuse that ‘I need to put my child to bed tonight’ doesn’t seem convincing.”

He said that he is “all too well aware” that many clergy are working 70 to 80 hours a week and he also knows that many also lose their day off to do the unanticipated funeral or hospital visit. “We just can’t go on like this. The clergy are being asked to take on more. The number of church buildings, PCCs, schools, parish projects, evangelism initiatives and community demands that each priest has responsibility for is increasing inexorably with the decline in the number of clergy. “And they are potential casualties. In most cases I believe clergy are working too hard and have not got the life/work balance right. Burnout happens and is often hidden. The parish priest is just not supposed to be depressed or worn out.” Richard Hardy, Churches and Community Development Manager at Care for the Family, welcomed the Bishop’s comments: “Those in church leadership do work long hours and it is very hard to strike a balance. But to avoid burnout it must be done.

“Church leaders have a dual calling not only to their parish but also to their family. They shouldn’t feel guilty about carving out time for their family in the same way that they prioritise their work. “This time should be precious and treated as such. We all need time out otherwise we will eventually pay the consequences.”

There has to be a fundamental change, the Bishop urged: “This subject needs debating by clergy and laity alike. It needs a national debate so that those beyond the church know there is a problem. And we want to avoid the other extreme where people perceive that ‘the vicar’s always busy so I won’t bother troubling him or her’.” The bishop added: “A 48-hour week would be a start in slowing down, but I’m somehow uncomfortable about it all. Yet I know something has got to change — and we all need help with that.”

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Disunity 'is the cost of women being bishops'
The Times, London

By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

THE Church of England is expected to commit itself today to the ordination of women bishops — the cost being unity with the Roman Catholic Church.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy- O’Connor, the leader of the four million Roman Catholics in England and Wales, expressed disappointment yesterday at the end of an ecumenical dream.

It was “inevitable” that there would be women bishops in the Anglican Church and so ecumenism was “at a plateau”. As co-chairman of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission for 16 years, the Cardinal spent much of his earlier ministry bringing about closer relations between the two churches.

Yesterday he said that he was saddened that many of its conclusions, such as in the area of authority, had not been “received” into the Anglican Church.

The General Synod, meeting not far from the Cardinal’s base in Westminster, was told that Roman Catholics remained committed to working with the Church of England. But Father Anthony Milner, the Catholic representative at the synod, asked how Catholics could continue an “impaired” dialogue when disagreements within the Anglican Church itself made it “hard to make out who you are talking to sometimes”.

In a paper to the synod, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference said that ordaining women bishops would be “a risk too far for the Church of England”.

Anglican orders were declared by a 19th-century papal bull to be “absolutely null and utterly void”, but the Catholic bishops said that women bishops in the Church of England would raise “serious questions” about the nature of the orders. Any doubts about their validity involved “serious doubts about the validity above all of the Eucharist celebrated by the priests concerned”.

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Orthodoxy is the True Catholic Church awaiting all her Anglican children...
R

http://newcriterion.com/archives/24/09/ ... f-england/

Features

Farewell, Church of England?
By Peter Mullen

Britain Today: Part VI
The Church of England is under assault—and the enemies are within. Peter Mullen, Chaplain to the Stock Exchange, tells us why the “whole institution is like a psychotic kindergarten,” and what must be done about it.

This article originally appeared in
The New Criterion, Volume 24, September 2005, page 34

As we prepare for our Harvest Festival Services, we see that what’s left of the English Church is indistinguishable from a lunatic asylum. Everywhere you peer inside this once refined and educated, lovely and lovable national institution, there is only a mania for self-destruction. How else can you account for church services that compete with pantomime for dramatized idiocy? For example, I recently attended a conference for clergy at a beautiful medieval church in Oxford. It was supposed to be a choral Eucharist but there was no organ music—only some plinky-plonky stuff on an out-of-tune piano and mindless choruses in the Jesus Goes to Toytown fashion: interminable glum repetition of what was not worth singing once.

Then the Bishop came on and told us that at the laughably misnamed riot called “The Peace” he didn’t want us merely to shake hands but to “hug one another”—and not just to hug one another, but to put our arms on our neighbor’s shoulders and say three times, “You are everlastingly loved.” When, with varying degrees of squeamishness, grown men fawned on one another in this way, the Bishop came on again in full pantomime mode and said, “Not loud enough! Again—louder!” Not one word from the Book of Common Prayer throughout the three-day conference or indeed from any source that might be identified as religious in the traditional sense. And that Bishop is now Archbishop of York.

They have thrown out the Book of Common Prayer and The Authorized Version of the Bible and substituted dumbed-down, politically correct prayers which sound as if they were written by a committee made up of Tony Blair, Karl Marx, and Noddy. I was at a synod for all the London clergy in All Souls, Langham Place. When it was time for the prayers, a female crooner came on the stage. Stage? Stage? But you thought this was supposed to be the church? Don’t ask! She warbled syrupy phrases about “race relations” and “those who seek to bring signs of enrichment.” Between each peti- tion was the soporific chorus, “Remember, remember.” That excruciating service was no anomaly. This is how it is almost everywhere you go in today’s Church of England. But are we supposed to turn to these fools for spiritual guidance? And don’t look to the next generation either: the giggling theological colleges are run like children’s television.

When it comes to Christenings, Weddings, and Funerals, the Church has given up talking to grown-ups and instead produces the sort of touchy-feely guff used in adverts directed at moony adolescents. At the Wedding, for instance, the new official book for every parish, Common Worship, makes the priest pray, “Let them be tender with each other’s dreams.” I think there should be a rubric in the margin saying, “At this point the congregation shall throw up—bride’s family’s side first.” At Christenings they have dropped the renunciation of “the devil and all his works” and there is barely a mention of sin. So what is Holy Baptism for? Only a sentimental prelude to the booze-up and the cake.

No “vile bodies” or “worms” are allowed to contaminate the new, euphemistic fu- nerals. And instead of “Jesus wept” we are given, “Jesus was moved to tears”—as if he’d just watched the lovers going down in the film Titanic for the umpteenth time. None of this mealy-mouthed, evasive schmaltz is the slightest use to the bereaved, of course. Blessed are they that mourn—but not here. And, where the traditional Prayer Book’s Holy Communion used to say those unbearably moving holy words “In the same night that he was betrayed,” the new book says, “He had supper with his friends.” I am not making this up. You couldn’t make it up. This is the official worship book of the Church of England. In the face of such blasphemous idiocy, mere satire becomes impossible.

Unbelievably, it is supposed that congregations might experience difficulties in comprehending even this sort of baby talk. So the Archbishop’s Council has produced an idiots’ Guide to Common Worship which enables us to dumb down even lower than Saturday evenings on BBC1. “Compline” becomes “Night Prayer.” In case we cannot understand, “O Lord, open thou our lips,” the Guide suggests we print at the start of the service, “We say hello!” And “Con- fession” is retitled, “Doing the dirt on ourselves.”

The way modern preachers talk down to congregations is bum-clenchingly embarrassing. Last Christmas I heard one say, “Like us, Mary had to accept that her son would grow up.” Is this insight, wisdom, or Woman’s Hour? Recently at our church of St. Michael, for the City Service, we had three ...

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Booze lands homosexual bishop in rehab
E-mail informs surprised clergy of 'increasing dependence' (AP)

CONCORD, New Hampshire (AP) -- The Episcopal Church's first openly homosexual bishop, V. Gene Robinson, has started treatment for alcoholism.

"I am writing to you from an alcohol treatment center where on February 1, with the encouragement and support of my partner, daughters and colleagues, I checked myself in to deal with my increasing dependence on alcohol," Robinson wrote in an e-mail to clergy Monday that was released Tuesday by the Diocese of New Hampshire.

Robinson's assistant, the Rev. Tim Rich, said Tuesday there was no crisis that led to Robinson's decision to seek treatment but rather a growing awareness of his problem.

In his letter, Robinson said he had been dealing with alcoholism for years and had considered it "as a failure of will or discipline on my part, rather than a disease over which my particular body simply has no control, except to stop drinking altogether."

Rich said the news surprised him and many other clergy.

"We did not see it in any way impact his ministry in the diocese," Rich said.

The Rev. David Jones, rector of Robinson's home church, St. Paul's in Concord, said he had never seen any sign that Robinson had a problem with alcohol.

Robinson was elected bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 and confirmed by the national church, causing an upheaval not only in the Episcopal Church, but the worldwide Anglican Communion of which it is part.

He will spend four weeks in rehabilitation. Spokesman Mike Barwell said the diocese would not disclose the location.

In the Episcopal Church system, such matters are handled within the diocese. Between sessions of the diocesan convention, the "standing committee," an elected panel of priests and lay parishioners, normally decides supervision of the diocese during a bishop's absence and other questions regarding his administration. The national church gets involved only in rare cases of formal charges involving misconduct.

The diocese's standing committee said its members support Robinson "and we commend him for his courageous example to us all, as we pray daily for him and for his ministry among us."

In addition to touching off protests and struggles for control and property in the Episcopal and other Anglican churches, Robinson has found himself a celebrity.

At New York's homosexual pride parade last spring, marchers and spectators crowded around him for more than three hours, reaching out to touch his hand, crying and thanking him.

"It sounds soap-operaish to say, but I'm the son of a tobacco sharecropper who didn't live in a house with running water until I was 10 years old. I can't believe I'm here, you know. So I find it very difficult to be anything but grateful," he said after the parade last year.

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Come-and-go worship
Church Times

By a staff reporter

A vicar in Hillingdon has introduced "come-and-go" worship on Sunday mornings, in an attempt to give members of the congregation more flexibility.

The Revd Rob Harrison, Vicar of St John's, Hillingdon, in the diocese of London, said that the new-look Sunday, which started this month, gave worshippers a chance to pick and choose each week. The service starts at 9 a.m., with a rolling programme of half-hour slots, ending with a lunch at 12.30 p.m. The programme ranges from the Book of Common Prayer to modern worship slots.

"When we decided on this, we had a unanimous PCC vote, and, at the first debriefing last week, we decided it was already a gain, not a loss. We've already had people who admitted that their Sunday was so busy they would not have come to church, but felt they could now, as it was easier to slot in and out," said Mr Harrison on Tuesday.

He said that some members of the congregation still came to their usual Sunday-service times; so there was a feeling of continuity. Running the services was not a headache, as, he said, it was far easier to involve lay people.