Episcopalians "irresponsible": Carey

Retired Archbishop Carey, in a Regina Leader-Post interview, calls Episcopalians, liberal and conservative, irresponsible:

1. "I do think, though, that by and large the American church has been irresponsible with regard to this because the appointment of (openly gay New Hampshire Bishop) Gene Robinson has created ... division. It wrecked mission in the church. It's decimated congregations ..."

2. "I'm retired now, and all I can do is to urge you [conservatives in TEC] to stay in the church as long as you possibly can. Don't leave. Wait till you're thrown out. Because it's your church. You haven't changed the doctrine at all. It's other people who are doing that. So stay there. [...] Now, they could be right [to leave]. They might be wrong. And so, who knows? All I say is that it's irresponsible to do as quickly as this.

Carey might be thinking of the confirmations he performed at Truro and The Fall Church when those churches refused visits by Bishop Lee.

WO, baby

WO = women's ordination. (Evidently, those who are fixated on it (usually the same as those thinking about gay sex all the time) have, over the course of time, developed a shorthand.)

Point (via titusonenine):

You opposed blessing homosexual relationships, but you were in favor of women’s ordination. Those two positions aren’t often held by the same person. How do you understand them going together?

[George Carey] I don’t see any problem whatsoever. On the one hand, the ordination of women is a very clear mandate in scripture, [which speaks] about women’s gifts being used in the church. I was working from that biblical premise and a theology of the equality of male and female. The issue of homosexuality is on a different basis all together. We are talking not about homosexuals being allowed or not allowed to be ordained. Of course, anyone can be ordained, but the lifestyle that’s required in scripture and in the Christian tradition is that ordination is open to either single, celibate men or a married priesthood. You can’t have a third order coming in. The ordination of practicing homosexuals throws up enormous challenges sacramentally about marriage, about [clerical] orders, about ordination itself. These are not easy issues to deal with.

Counterpoint:

[Stuart Smith] The connective tissue between WO and homosexuality advocacy is as follows: Both deny the order built into God’s creation of Man and Woman (with the man as head, the woman as helpmate to the head…see Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5), with WO advocates reading into Galatians’ equality in baptismal dignity the equivalence of man/woman in holy orders; while the advocates of homosexuality deny the order of creation of man for woman in the cleaving together bond of marriage. For ABC Carey, apparently, there is no evidence of the difference between equality of dignity…YES…and the equivalence of position/order/ministry…NO…of women in the church.

Both believe that Tradition can be adjusted for contemporary psychological insights (woman is full inheritor of the rights to ordination; lesbians and gays are full inheritors of the rights to conjugal ‘union’), and both use the suspicious ‘evidence’ of their argument by EXPERIENCE: the homosexuals claiming the holiness and joy of their unions; WO advocates claiming the fruitful ministries and joy by the women who have gained their previously denied opportunities to serve as clergy.