The Episcopal Church has joined in an apology made by the U.S. Conference of the World Council of Churches for the foreign, economic and environmental policies of the Bush Administration. The WCC met for its ninth assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from Feb. 14-23.

While “not a statement of the Episcopal Church,” the Rt. Rev. C. Christopher Epting, the Presiding Bishop’s deputy for interfaith and ecumenical affairs and chief of the U.S. delegation, told The Living Church, it is a document that the Church should “respond to, reflect upon, and take seriously. But it is certainly not a binding document of the Episcopal Church.

“We haven’t voted on it, but it does represent the views of the American delegations at the WCC,” he said. The Feb. 18 letter endorsed by the 34 American delegations to the ninth assembly stated, “We acknowledge that we are citizens of a nation that has done much in these years to endanger the human family and to abuse the creation.”

The statement accuses the U.S. of “raining down terror on the truly vulnerable among our global neighbors” and undertaking “imperial projects that seek to dominate and control” the world. “We lament,” the letter said, “with particular anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights.”

The American letter to the WCC also laments America’s violation of the “rivers, oceans, lakes, rainforests and wetlands that sustain us” and seeks forgiveness for the rejection of the Kyoto protocol and other “multilateral agreements aimed at reversing disastrous trends.” America, the letter concludes, has been “seduced by the lure of empire.”

Questioned by TLC as to the drafting and endorsement of the document, which was presented without signatures to the WCC, the convener of the American Conference, Fr. Leonid Kishkovsky of the Orthodox Church in America, said it had been circulated among the heads of the 34 delegations for revision and approval. Fr. Kishkovsky said no one had objected to the document and it therefore was presented to the assembly as the views of all of the American delegations.

Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church of the USA, told TLC that while he had not personally signed the document, as it was a statement of the delegations, it received his full support—a stance the leaders of the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, National Council of Churches and the Mennonite Church said they also shared.

(The Rev.) George Conger

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