Clergy and lay delegates to the annual convention in the Diocese of San Joaquin voted Dec. 8 on the second and final reading of a constitutional amendment to leave The Episcopal Church and following introduction of a canonical amendment from the floor, convention voted to accept an offer of affiliation from the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone.
"We are now members of the Southern Cone," said the person who announced the vote tally from the convention podium. His announcement just before lunch on final day of the two-day meeting met with subdued applause from those gathered at St. James' Cathedral in Fresno, Calif. Throughout the meeting San Joaquin Bishop John-David Schofield had appealed for the majority to show compassion toward the minority in the diocese who do not want to leave The Episcopal Church.
Afterward a lay delegate from Holy Family, Fresno, rose on a point of personal privilege to ask who the ecclesiastical authority of the diocese would be if Bishop Schofield were to be inhibited. One of the two diocesan chancellors responded that since the convention no longer recognized the authority of The Episcopal Church, Bishop Schofield could only be inhibited by the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone.
2 Comments
Everybody has lost.
+HW Shipps
"And of discerning goodness, there are but these two ways: the one the knowledge of the causes whereby it is made such, the other the observation of those signs and tokens, which being annexed always unto goodness, argue that where they are found, there also goodness is, although we know not the cause by force whereof it is there. The former of these is the most sure and infallible way, but so hard that all shun it, and had rather walk as men do haphazardly in the dark, than tread so long and intricate mazes for the sake of knowledge. As therefore Physicians are many times forced to leave such methods of curing as they themselves know to be the fittest, and being overruled by their patient's impatience are fain to try the best they can, in taking that way of cure which the cured will yield unto: in like sort, consider how the case doth stand with this present age, full of tongue and weak of brain..."
- St. Richard Hooker, Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1.8.2
"Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures."
- James 4:1 - 3
"Jesus said to Peter, 'Put away your sword!'"
- The Gospel According to John 18:6a