Best line in Michael Paulson’s unusually good Boston Globe article on Sunday about a Southern Episcopal church’s uncertainty about how to express its displeasure with the election of a gay bishop in New Hampshire:
“I’ve heard people say they don’t know if they still feel comfortable taking Communion, and I think to myself, ‘Give me a break,’” said [Cecil H. Nelson Jr., the chair of Christ Church’s $15 million capital campaign]. “Is it Bishop Robinson in the Communion, or Jesus Christ?”
In today’s Globe, Paulson reports the most telling fact about the gathering of outraged conservative Episcopalians in Dallas this week. If you thought they were looking for solutions rather than trying to generate a media circus for the culture war, read this:
In a clear sign of their alienation from the national church, the organizers of the Dallas conference refused to allow the denomination’s presiding bishop, Frank T. Griswold, and the president of the denomination’s House of Deputies, George Werner, to send a delegation of observers, which was to include two bishops, a seminary president, and a priest . . .
Conference organizers said they were not allowing any observers other than the news media.
A photograph accompanying the article provided a delicious example of false consciousness, too: A woman priest at the conference, applauding a speaker who was attacking the Episcopal Church’s deviations from tradition. For her sake, I hope the schismatics don’t elect one of the bishops from Dallas to head up the break-away traditionalist church, or she’ll have to give back her collar.