More helpful language from Bishop Tom Wright, who will be in the United States selling books before you know it:
Please note, I do not for one moment underestimate the awful situation that many of our American and Canadian friends have found themselves in, vilified, attacked and undermined by ecclesiastical authority figures who seem to have lost all grip on the gospel of Jesus Christ and to be eager only for lawsuits and property squabbles. I pray daily for many friends over there who are in intolerable situations and I don’t underestimate the pressures and strains. But I do have to say, as well, that these situations have been exploited by those who have long wanted to shift the balance of power in the Anglican Communion and who have used this awful situation as an opportunity to do so.
This paragraph [from his Saturday lecture] prompts a few questions, the first of which is: What is he talking about? Who, other than those who seek to leave the Church and take its property have been taken to court? Of what does the “awful” treatment consist? Being in a theological minority? Does he really believe that people who disagree with him about the morality of same-sex relationships have “lost all grip on the gospel of Jesus Christ”?
As the Pluralist points out, this kind of cheap equation of being in a theological minority with genuine human suffering, and of ordaining a gay bishop with, say going to war in Iraq, are becoming the stock in trade of Wright and his acolytes at Fulcrum and elsewhere.
The Pluralist writes:
There is another comment to make as to just how immoral this whole matter has become, how self-obsessed are the Churches, how atrocious is the stance. Look at this comparison also made by Andrew Goddard:
Wannenwetsch then notes that “the recent installation of the first openly homosexual bishop in the Anglican diocese of New Hampshire has been widely recognised an act of this quality” (72). He provides other examples – the South African Dutch Reformed Church’s proclamation of apartheid as biblical and the German Protestant response to Nazi Aryan and anti-Semitic teaching.
This is nothing less than appalling. Appalling to compare a consecration of an openly gay man, in a loving relationship, as bishop with the evils of apartheid and Nazism.
Is this what being Church is all about?
Andrew Goddard: you and all those like you should hold your head in shame. For God’s sake get some perspective.
UPDATE: April 15, 2 p.m. ET
Ruth Gledhill followed up on this story with Lambeth Palace and with Bishop Wright. Her comments are here.
Speaking of Bishop Wright:
But forgive me, Bishop, if I do dare to doubt.
Do you know what I hope? I hope – indeed pray – that everyone just turns up, whether invited or not. Then they’ll be able to fill those 200 empty rooms at Kent University. And then we’ll have a story to write this summer. Because otherwise, at the rate it is going, Lambeth 2008 is going to be the biggest non-event ever, the non-event that is perhaps precisely what is desired by Lambeth Palace.