"OHIO FIVE" BISHOPS CONDEMN SECRET MEETINGS

News Analysis

By David W. Virtue

August 14, 2004

It's been going on for years. Secret, closed-door meetings, the equivalent of smoke-filled rooms and Tammany Hall styled politics. Latterly it became semi-public small groups where bishops of opposing theologies and morals would face each other and attempt, with deep pain-filled looks, to try and smooth over irreconcilable theological and moral differences. If that didn't work everyone then took Eucharist together — the great Episcopal leveler.

That is how the Episcopal Church House of Bishops has been operating all these years; and always with the hubris of "graceful conversation," "listening," and the new buzzwords of "inclusivity" and "diversity" filling the air, but in the end agreeing with whatever it is the Presiding Bishop thinks the direction the church should go in.

It was always a shell game. The revisionists playing for time, often using local option, while pushing their liberal agenda. The orthodox kept drawing more lines in the sand and the revisionists kept pushing even further. Spong got louder and uglier in his bullying tactics, and the conservatives kept retreating for fear of offending the "moderate middle," hoping that the HOB might not swing radically to the left. It was all horrible self deception and lies.

But this week back room politics and "smoke-filled rooms" came to a screeching halt. In an open letter to the Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, five senior bishops (all retired) expressed deep regret that a pattern of secrecy still continues in Episcopal leadership even as the doctrinal crisis in the denomination grows daily.

What they were upset about was this. On March 14 of this year these five senior bishops crossed diocesan lines and confirmed 110 at an unprecedented and historic service in the Diocese of Ohio at a multi-congregational Service of Confirmation and Holy Eucharist representing five Episcopal churches and one Anglican church plant, from various communities in northern Ohio.

A meeting planned for August 13, 2004 between the Presiding Bishop's Council of Advice led by Louisiana Bishop Charles Edward Jenkins III and the five bishops was cancelled after the Presiding Bishop refused to allow non-participating observers to attend.

"We feel strongly that a meeting of this importance should not be held in secret," the letter reads. "There is a history of closed door meetings in the House of Bishops. Our distrust of closed meetings on vital issues, as well as our assessment of the gravity of the current crisis in this Church, compelled us to insist that our meeting with your Council of Advice include non-participating observers."

The five bishops including C. Fitz-Simons Allison, Maurice Benitez, William Cox, Alex Dickson and William Wantland know only too well what such a meeting without observers would yield.

The "Ohio Five" said in their letter that the real issue was the serious "departure from the faith" at the 2003 General Convention when bishops defeated Resolution B001, a measure affirming the historic faith. "It is difficult to understand how bishops could vote against the faith they swore to uphold at their consecration," they said in their letter. "It has been reported that bishops did this for political reasons. If this is true, then this is in pitiful contrast to our predecessors who stood for the Faith, even in the face of death."

Then Bishop Maurice Benitez delivered the coup d'etat for the group. He wrote: "This defeat of B001 was in many ways worse than the two highly publicized decisions on V. Gene Robinson and same sex blessings because it tore away the foundation on which those decisions should have been based. We have abandoned 2000 years of Christian teaching on sexuality, but more importantly we have ignored the authority of Scripture. The result has been chaos in the Episcopal Church — ECUSA has lost large numbers of individuals and congregations, ecumenical relationships have been damaged and the denomination is now in a state of impaired communion with 22 of the 38 Anglican Provinces. The survival of the entire Anglican Communion is at stake."

The five bishops said they were committed to public clarity on the issues rather than "private dialogue" which has so failed the church.

"We need to acknowledge the reality of what has been wrought by ECUSA's faithlessness," said Bishop Alex Dickson. "Our concern is for those faithful Episcopalians who feel they cannot accept pastoral care from revisionist bishops and priests and feel 'like sheep without a shepherd.' We pray the Primates of the Anglican Communion will discipline ECUSA as well as provide pastoral relief to our Church," he concluded.

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