Updated thrice – see below
First, two items concerning the story reported earlier here about the Ugandan diocese of South Rwenzori.
The Church Times covered it in Ugandan diocese rejects US funds. This includes a reference to the Washington Post column reported earlier here, and discussed at some length by Andrew Brown in this week’s Press column, not yet online, but here are two quotes:
NO ONE seems to have reported Dr Williams’s complaint in Holy Week that the press was ignoring important things the Anglican Communion was up to. A story in the Washington Post should entirely justify the press’s bias…
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to over-estimate the damage that these stories do. One indicator is Stephen Bates’s largely hostile profile in The Guardian of Dr Williams, whose reputation on the paper seems never to have recovered from a lunch he attended there, where, every time he attempted to say something interesting, he allowed himself to be shushed by an aide. Versions of this story have come to me from several of the people present, on whom it made a lasting impression.
Meanwhile, the Living Church reports the response of Michael Creighton Bishop of Central Pennsylvania to all this in Bishop laments break with Ugandan companion diocese
In an interview with The Living Church, Bishop Creighton said “It felt like a Good Friday nail in the compassion of Christ.”…
Bishop Creighton said he was perplexed by the decision to break relations as the Windsor Report had encouraged “consultation” and not confrontation. “Our Gospel understanding,” he said, is “when people were labeled as ‘sinners and wrong doers,’ Jesus invited himself into relationship, not out of relationship.”
Bishop Creighton said he had written to Bishop Tembo noting “our dismay that our consent to the election of a bishop in New Hampshire appears to be more important than the compassionate ministry we have shown with his own people who are struggling with and dying of AIDS.”
Since the diocese began its companion relationship with South Rwenzori in 2001, Central Pennsylvania purchased a truck for the diocese and provided tuition for medical students, medicines, and other funds to assist the diocese and the Bishop Masereka Foundation—a Ugandan NGO—to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS, Bishop Creighton told The Living Church.
“The total of this support exceeds $65,000,” Bishop Creighton said, but he disputed that the Ugandan diocese had requested $352,941 as was stated in Bishop Tembo’s letter.
Update This further Statement from Bishop Jackson Nzerebende Tembo on the relationship of South Rwenzori Diocese, Uganda, to the Diocese of Central Pennsylvania, USA has just appeared on titusonenine.
Further Update And shortly after that, two letters to the editor of the Washington Post, one of them from David Anderson of the AAC, also appeared on the web.
Another Update
This article in the Lancaster Sunday News Local, African churches split over gay issue contains further detail.
The same Church Times page also contains (scroll down) two other Communion stories: Bill Bowder on Griswold rounds on ‘evil’ detractors and a brief report on Scottish statement. The first of these includes:
TACTICS used by conservatives to influence the Primates’ Meeting in Newry in February have been branded as “evil” by the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States (ECUSA), the Most Revd Frank Griswold.
At the US House of Bishops meeting before Easter ( News, 18 March), Bishop Griswold is reported to have named a group of US clergy, including the Bishop of Pittsburgh, the Rt Revd Robert Duncan, accusing them of misrepresenting what was happening in ECUSA.
In an interview with Deborah Caldwell for Beliefnet website, the Presiding Bishop said that evil had been “pressing” on the meeting of the Primates in February.
“There were notices put on the tables in Ireland describing ‘acts of oppression’ within the Episcopal Church that were highly inaccurate. . . I said my sense is – and I don’t assign it to any particular people – I feel that there is evil pressing on this meeting.”
Bishop Griswold argued that overseas Primates had been recruited into ECUSA’ s internal struggles. “Various groups related to the Episcopal Church – well-funded, to be sure – have engaged the disapproval of the Primates around homosexuality in order to portray the Episcopal Church as grossly unfaithful and unbiblical, and in every way reprehensible…”
The link to Mr. Anderson’s letter provoked my comment. Why, on God’s troubled earth, would “cannon” Anderson waste his soul on destroying the Episcopal Church? What a vicious devil he makes of himself in prosecuting his vendetta. Call a good therapist ASAP.
The Episcopal Church has done a very good job of destroying itself. You cannot blame Cannon Anderson. I pray the church will wake up before it is too late and follow the rest of the Anglican Family.
I find it reprehensible to call others reprehesible or paint them as evil pawns.
Sounds to me that the PB sees schism as a forgone conclusion and is now trying to assign blame to orthodox believers. I think he is half right.