The Church's homosexuality "mess" has claimed another casualty. Father Alvin Kimel, the Pontificator, has announced that he intends to renounce his Episcopalian orders and enter in full communion with the Church of Rome (intending to seek ordination into the Roman Catholic priesthood). You may read his announcement here.
The degree to which this becomes a flashpoint for sensitive, thinking, scholarly people still astounds me, as I said at the inception of this soapbox enterprise.
If you care to check out the comments to Brother Al's announcement, you will find my personal reaction (response?) to his announcement. I won't go into it here.
It saddens me that he has chosen to swim the Tiber rather than to fight for right within the Episcopalian Church. I must think more, as I hint in my comment, about the ecumenical implications of such decisions. Suffice it to say right now (and I hope that this is more than mere self-justification for not leaving Lutheranism), I don't know that the Body of Christ in any of its members is so rightly ordered as to warrant going there from where we find ourselves. But then, I might have a less finely honed sense of heresy than does the Pontificator
On the bright side, if gives up blogging, perhaps I can claim his blog's name: I have envied him that title since I discovered it. And let's be frank, wouldn't be a bit both presumptuous and awkward for a convert to Rome to call himself the "Pontificator"?
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In a hundred years will we have Episcopal priests "crossing the Tiber" because someone pointed out that we're still eating catfish and shrimp that aren't allowed in our diets by the same texts that prompted Pontificator's jump? And with the same logic behind the proscriptions?
The screech of the chalk on the board chases a few from the classroom while most of us remain in our seats, carrying on with the work given to us to do. The homo-ecclesia issue seems to be heading in the same direction, despite the screeching that continues from the Canon Complainer of South Carolina and his very small cadre of very loud friends looking to drag our church back into slavery times -- OK, at least pre-women-priests?
IF these men were to proclaim their message of division and schism from cities in which there were no homeless, no hungry, and no untreated sick children, I would listen more attentively.
The Nigerian delegation wouldn't have been allowed to sit in the front row of any church in the AAC eighty years ago, and now they're the ones with the answers?
My bravo-sierra detector has been at full alarm for many months.
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