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BACKROOM POLITICS GOT WOMAN BISHOP ELECTED PRESIDING BISHOP

BACKROOM POLITICS GOT WOMAN BISHOP ELECTED PRESIDING BISHOP

Special Report

By David W. Virtue
www.virtueonline.org

COLUMBUS, OH: (6/19/2006)--The election of Nevada Bishop Katharine Schori to the post of Presiding Bishop was engineered by Los Angeles Bishop J. Jon Bruno, when Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold reneged on "significant funding" he promised Bruno in his lawsuit against St. James, Newport Beach to retake the parish.

St. James and four other parishes had fled The Episcopal Church over the national church's rejection of the authority of Scripture and the moral decline of the church reflected in the consecration of New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson.

VirtueOnline was told that Schori was brokered in by a cabal of West Coast bishops, liberal bishops who hated Griswold, and a number of conservative bishops who wanted to make it clear to the Anglican Communion that the Episcopal Church was hell bent and would never repent or do a U-turn away from its revisionist agenda. They wanted to make it crystal clear where the church was heading, and a vote for Schori would do it.

As the story goes, Bruno was promised funding that never came through and this angered the West coast bishop. He got a stick in the eye from 815 (the church's national headquarters) and he was not about to forgive Griswold.

Secondly, a conclave of some 20 conservative and liberal bishops called by Bruno earlier this year to try and resolve how to deal with conservative parishes that wanted to flee revisionist bishops and come under conservative bishops, nothing came of it. Why? Frank Griswold disavowed it.

Bruno saw this as a double cross. After the conclave Bruno thought he had a deal but found he had no deal at all.

The deal they cut at the time was that liberal bishops would get all the liberal congregations and the conservative bishops get all the conservative congregations and they would split the rest. It never happened, Griswold called off the deal.

Infuriated, Bruno said he would line up the votes for Schori in her bid for Presiding Bishop.

Then another factor entered into the discussion - the sale of 815 2nd Ave. in New York. (This had been raised before when it was thought that to save millions, the building, on prime Manhattan real estate could be sold rather than fixed up, the church would move onto the grounds of General Theological Seminary. But Griswold nixed it for what he called "missional" purposes.)

When she became a candidate for the top slot Schori, in March, said she was going to move the headquarters from New York to St. Louis. Schori told Bruno she would do that. Bruno did not object largely because to reach 815 by phone from the West coast, (they never answered their phones after 3.45pm) one had to phone from the West coast only in the morning. Other West coast bishops also complained about this.

Bruno also wanted to see 815 sold as well as did a lot of other bishops who were in favor of it. Why? because they wanted to break up the old boy network around New York and move it some place in the Midwest like Cincinnati or St. Louis.

Bruno was able to line up the votes ahead of the convention to swing it her way. Bruno did the whole thing. He also wanted to get rid of the good old southern boy network as well because they were featuring so prominently in the list of Presiding Bishop candidates.

The truth is Bruno is a poor imitation of the Holy Spirit guiding the church in choosing a new presiding bishop -unless the Holy Spirit has decided that the time has come to bring this disgrace to an end. As Jeffrey Steenson the Bishop of the Rio Grande used to say: "The Episcopal Church, I wouldn't have missed it for the world".

Some very liberal bishops also voted for Schori to stick it in the eye of the Anglican Communion.

END

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