ALABAMA: FORMER ST. LUKE'S PRIEST LEAVES EPISCOPAL DIOCESE

GREG GARRISON

News staff writer

8/2/2004

The Rev. William Wilson, a priest who was on the staff of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Mountain Brook for four years, has left the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama.

Wilson had objected to the Episcopal Church's approval of an openly gay bishop last year, Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

"It's the end of the sacredness of sexuality," Wilson said. "I do not think the Christian vision of sexuality includes sex outside marriage."

In protest, Wilson applied for acceptance as a priest in the Anglican Diocese of Bolivia and was granted that recognition.

"It was a way to resolve conscience," Wilson said.

Wilson said he had hoped he would be allowed to function as a visiting Anglican priest in Alabama Episcopal churches, but that request has been denied by Episcopal Bishop Henry N. Parsley. "I wanted to be treated like a priest from another diocese," Wilson said.

Instead, Parsley removed Wilson's faculties, so that he cannot lead worship services as a priest in churches of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama, Wilson said. Wilson had been an Episcopal priest in the Diocese of Alabama since 1990, he said.

Efforts to reach Parsley for comment were unsuccessful.

Wilson, 67, said he has begun his own small congregation, called Church of the Most Blessed Name, which will meet for the first time on Sept. 12 at 5 p.m. in the Chapel at Glenwood on Sicard Hollow Road.

He has also recently written a book, "Four Essentials: Classical Disciplines of Christian Spirituality," in which he expounds on monastic traditions, based upon his 25 years of experience as a cloistered Trappist monk who once lived in a hut as a hermit under a rule of silence.

"It's a translation of the monastic tradition to the Christian life of the world," he said of the book.

In 1981, Wilson went to the Andes mountains in Bolivia and founded the Amistad Mission, which now operates a hospital, retreat house, school and orphanage for the poor in Cochabamba. He left the Catholic priesthood to be married in 1989 and became a priest in the Episcopal Church, which allows married priests. Wilson and his wife, Susan, a surgeon, have two children.

Wilson was priest associate for spiritual formation and associate rector for four years at St. Luke's, where he left the staff Dec. 31. "I love Episcopalians," he said. "They were church and family to me."

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