Updated again Tuesday evening
There have been a number of responses to the interview in The Times reported below.
Church Mouse as previously reported, here.
Changing Attitude TUCKED AWAY BEHIND THE PAY WALL …
and
Yearning for change in the Anglican Communion – discrimination wrong, affirmation right
Benny’s Blog Archbishop’s empty words
Lesley’s blog Why can’t Rowan Williams be candid?
and
Splitting the church over homosexuality?
Significant Truths Archbishop asks to pass…
and
Won’t say, daren’t say
Anglican Mainstream Response to Archbishop of Canterbury’s Views on ‘Gay’ Bishops in The Times
Cranmer’s Curate ARCHBISHOP’S ‘PASS’ WAS SOLD BACK IN 1991
Never read ‘Benny’s Blog’ before. It’s great. A blast of fresh air and honesty.
Yes Benny’s blog is indeed a blast of fresh air !
Sister Rosemary’s words quoted on it, really really hit the nail on the head.
Why oh why can’t she be archbishop ? The men have messed it all up too much.
So if a brother and sister choose to set up a household as partners (economic or whatever), they dishonor marriage? The authors of the piece for Anglican Mainstream stoop to this kind of drivel? This borders on lunacy; I can’t even regard this idea as rational thought. My 85 year old mother and her 96 year old sister live together in my mothers house to provide each other comfort and assistance. They share bills; they used to take turns cooking. My aunt is now blind and nearly deaf, so she can’t do those things any more. Does this arrangement somehow… Read more »
“Messrs. Giddings and Sugden. What a dim view of humanity they must have.”
And tragically, an even *dimmer* view of God.
“If we consider a parallel situation to that of a homosexual priest and a partner, namely that of a male priest setting up home with his woman partner, that household would not honour marriage, even if the relationship were celibate.” Anglican ‘Mainstream’ blog – Messrs Gidding and Sugden are seriously suggesting that any male Roman Catholic priest who has a live-in houskeeper is in some way ‘dishonouring’ the sacrament of Marriage!! So fixed are they on their fear of homosexual relationships that they here compromise and live-in relationship between a male and a female as being detrimental to the sacrament… Read more »
Why can’t Rowan be candid?
Because he’s a technocrat, a politician, a *liar*.
He, and these Sugden-Giddings-Okoh-Minns-Duncans-types are clogs in the arteries of Humanity’s salvation.
Anyone got any Coumadin?
Anglican Mainstream seem to be saying that Christian leaders have to be married (heterosexually), no other option, even celibate, will do. By their logic a monastery presumably “would not honour marriage” either. Come on, Sugden and Giddings, say it.
And then what about married Christian leaders who might (horror of horrors) be a bit more imaginative in private than merely making babies for Jesus… You could like awake all night trying not to think about it.
I thought the Sugden-Giddings posting was almost unhinged. But that’s good – fewer and fewer people are going to pay any attention to that kind of rubbish.
Anglicans, even thinking ones, seem to be going round and round in circles on these gay issues. Now, in the wake of the papal visit, it seems that true advances are being made by none other than the RCC. One blogger writes: ” In a series of interviews before and after the visit, Archbishop Vincent Nichols has said that the primary characteristic of a Catholic is not blind obedience to Church authority, but a conscientious search for the truth. With specific reference to the Soho LGBT Masses, he insisted that it is not for the priest to judge the conscience… Read more »
Abp Nichols in The Telegraph: Should the Church one day accept the reality of gay partnerships? “I don’t know. There is in the Book of Nature an inherent connection between human sexuality and procreation; and those two things cannot ultimately be totally separate. People who are of a homosexual orientation say: ‘Well, hang on a minute. How is the Book of Nature written in me?’ The most important thing the Christian tradition says is, don’t see yourself simply as an isolated individual but as part of a wider family. The moral demands on all of us made by that tradition… Read more »
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Whatever could possibly be wrong, in this day of overpopulation, stretched resources, human-caused species extinction and climate change, with preferring the virtues of friendship to those of procreation? I understand Archbishop Nichols cannot speak plainly, but someone within one of these religious traditions must show some leadership in the unprecedented situation humans are facing on this planet. (We already know it won’t be Archbishop Williams!) The virtues of friendship are exalted within Christian tradition; it’s not as though there’s nothing to build on here. Would the Catholic hierarchy prefer a Western version of China’s one-child policy?… Read more »
Archbishop Nichols reveals himself as a wise and humane pastor within his own Church’s teaching. But when it comes to the “open to the creation of new life bit” how does that relate to those marrying late in life where childbearing is impossible, or to those male or female who marry knowing they are unable to have children, or to those with some psychological or physical disability who might decide to marry despite knowing full coital relationships within marriage are impossible.. ? Which is more important-self giving in total fidelity or openess to new life?
That’s Nichols. He, it seems to me, has clearly ‘progressed’ on the particular issue. Would the Pope have said these things? Surely not. Hardline RCs of course dismiss Nichols and the English RC bishops in general as ‘liberals’ or even crypto-Protestants. So the question is: how far do such sentiments represent ‘Catholic thinking’? Answer: they do and they don’t. To the extent that they do, that’s great, but they won’t become ‘official thinking’, and they only mark a more dramatic form than the congenital gulf between what most Catholics think and what the Vatican tells them.
BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last Saturday featured the Times story, so I parted with £1.50 at my local newsagents. “Gay bishops are all right by me, says Archbishop” was the front page splash, which is of course grossly misleading, especially online – the paywall won’t allow you to beyond this headline without paying – but then “single, celibate, preferably virgin and never once promoted gay equality” would have made a clumsy headline. The magazine article, based on an interview with the Archbishop is wide-reaching and written in a way very sympathetic to gay people in the Church. It is… Read more »
Vincent Nicholl’s new readings of RC positions including mortal sin, seems to me to make a good deal of sense, now.
He compares favourably with another archbishop in The Times.
Wow reading Sugden et al I really didn’t know whether to guffaw, sob, or yawn and turn the page in search of something truer and more nourishing that conservative bell jar word games. Can it really, common sensically be true that Sugden and Giddings and similar cannot distinguish between lying, murder, forgetting to shine your shoes before going out, and pairbonded queer folks (who are often these days, raising children?)? Ditto, for the tired repeat business that limiting the full size, height, depth of sex in human embodiment exclusively to reproduction is helpful, let alone essentialist-comprehensive, let alone salvific? Surely… Read more »
He doesn’t want to carry on in post until he is 70, which would suggest bowing out before the next Lambeth conference.
Doesn’t he ?
Will he ?
Interesting that several are praising Archbishop Nichols . . . and our most prolific RC poster here (at TA) falls radio silent? ;-/
Rowan still wants large basic solid gold credit for defending the human rights of queer folks, globally; when in truth all he has done is dimly echo British (western? Euro?) government, law, policy which continues to be much clearer and more assertive. Dim, timid comes even more to the fore when one considers that Rowan seeks to bask in the reflected glow of human rights/fairness credits, while at the same time he damns fundamental ideas as secularist with faint praise indeed, less than worthy when compared to theological ideals and doctrines of God’s supremacy (not least, as wrathful?). That such… Read more »
You can choose Vincent Nichols or the Universal Catechism, and I know which I take.
The so-called Universal Catechism is a very mixed bag, with some parts bordering on biblical fundamentalism. I think it would be unwise to treat it as a document putting an end to critical reflection and debate.
“Universal” Catechism, RIW?
I choose a different universe! *LOL*
“In his (the ABC’s) apparently open minded comments on the suitability (or not) of homosexuals to be priests and bishops, he has once again treated their sexuality as optional ‘add-on’ to life by insisting that while he would have ‘no problem’ with a celibate gay bishop, he regards the issue of homosexual relationships as ‘a particular choice of life’. – Benny’s Blog – Surely, Benny is right here – to protest about the ABC’s particularity in saying ‘Yes’ to clergy and bishops being homosexual, and yet ‘No’ to their exercise of their sexuality. If the ABC were to advocate the… Read more »