Who Is The Rt Rev Michael Gill?

TAC Bishop of Pretoria and Southern Africa Michael Gill is a hard one to track. He's been a clear leader of the anti-Hepworth, anti-Anglicanorum coetibus faction of the TAC, but as is common among the TAC bishops, there's no official biography on any TAC web site. The most information I've been able to find is in a parish newsletter of St Edmund's Waterloo, Ontario, which contains a report on the TAC 2007 Portsmouth meeting. (St Edmund's treated Gill favorably here, but since it became Anglican Use, we must assume there was a later parting of the ways.) Gill was consecrated bishop at that same meeting, following the death of his predecessor in June 2007 and his election at a diocesan synod. He signed the 2007 Portsmouth Letter from the TAC bishops as a bishop-elect.

Although Gill was ordained at some point as a priest in the mainstream Anglican Communion, I haven't been able to find him in ordinary parish ministry. The parish newsletter linked above says,

After leaving school he worked in the freight industry. He then studied at St Paul's College in Grahamstown, and at the University of South Africa. He is an ordained Priest, and was appointed as the Chaplain to St Mary's DSG [Diocesan School for Girls] in Pretoria where he served for 16 years.

However, his main career seems to be as a school administrator, and as bishop he continues to have a day job as a deputy principal at the Jeppe High School for Boys in Johannesburg. (Both St Mary's DSG and Jeppe appear to be among the most prestigious in South Africa.) Left unanswered is where he had his seminary education and the date and the reason he left the mainstream Anglican Communion for the very small TAC franchise in Southern Africa.

It's worth pointing out that school administators have never had a reputation for high intelligence, and Gill appears to follow in this ignoble tradition. In that context, I offer this quote from the 2007 Portsmouth Letter, to which Deputy Principal Gill affixed his signature:

1. We accept the ministry of the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter, which is a ministry of teaching and discerning the faith and a “perpetual and visible principle and foundation of unity” and understand this ministry is essential to the Church founded by Jesus Christ. We accept that this ministry, in the words of the late John Paul II in Ut Unum Sint, is to “ensure the unity of all the Churches”. We understand his words in the same Letter when he explains to the separated churches that the Bishop of Rome “when circumstances require it, speaks in the name of all the Pastors in communion with him. He can also – under very specific conditions clearly laid down by the First Vatican Council – declare ex cathedra that a certain doctrine belongs to the deposit of faith. By thus bearing witness to the truth, he serves unity”. We understand that, as bishops separated from communion with the Bishop of Rome, we are among those for whom Jesus prayed before his death “that they may be completely one”, and that we teach and define matters of faith and morals in a way that is, while still under the influence of Divine Grace, of necessity more tenuously connected to the teaching voice of catholic bishops throughout the world.
2. We accept that the Church founded by Jesus Christ subsists most perfectly in the churches in communion with the See of Peter, to whom (after the repeated protestation of his love for Jesus) and to whose successors, our Divine Master gave the duty of feeding the lambs and the sheep of his flock.
3. We accept that the most complete and authentic expression and application of the catholic faith in this moment of time is found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its Compendium, which we have signed together with this Letter as attesting to the faith we aspire to teach and hold.
4. Driven by these realizations, which we must now in good conscience bring to the attention of the Holy See, we seek a communal and ecclesial way of being Anglican Catholics in communion with the Holy See, at once treasuring the full expression of catholic faith and treasuring our tradition within which we have come to this moment. We seek the guidance of the Holy See as to the fulfillment of these our desires and those of the churches in which we have been called to serve.

But by 2011, our deputy principal had reversed himself on these matters, saying in a letter to ACA Bishops Strawn, Marsh, and Williams,

Anglicanorum Coetibus was a response in part by the Roman Catholic Church to our 2007 letter; what (in any environment) would be a normal bargaining exercise. That some of our Episcopal TAC brethren have simply swallowed it, 'hook, line and sinker', is evidence both of their naivety and their desperation to be accepted.

Excuse me? Wasn't the whole point of the 2007 letter

That the TAC seeks corporate reunion with the Holy See without condition. In this way there would be no need for committees discussing doctrine and reporting back to various authorities. It would be a straight out application for corporate reunion, no strings attached.

and

Any petition to Rome would need to include an explicit recognition of the Petrine Office (i.e., the Office of Pope) as being of the esse of the Church. Put simply it would mean that the TAC accepts that the constitution of the Church as given by Christ included the leadership of St Peter as it has been handed on in the Church ever since. That the Pope has real and immediate jurisdiction in every local Church and enjoys the gift of infallibility when teaching in certain circumstances.

On top of which, the bishops, including the deputy principal, signed the Catechism of the Catholic Church as well. So let me see. The intent of the 2007 letter was to ask for union with the Holy See without condition. It acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope. The bishops as a gesture of good faith signed the Catechism on top of everything else. The whole point was to say yes, we're swallowing this hook, line, and sinker! Yes, we're actually pretty desperate! Yet the deputy principal four years later said this was just part of a "normal bargaining exercise"? It takes me back to my own school days and the sessions I had with my own deputy principals: it's my school, kid. I make the rules. I don't care what I said yesterday, I'm saying what I'm saying today.

And what on earth did the TAC have to bargain with? In my last post, I said the US membership was in the low four digits. If the Australian membershp is 400, the South African membership can't be much different. We know nothing of the membership in India, but in light of the other countries, I can't imagine it's much different, either. So there's a great likelihood the TAC as a whole is still in four digits -- Wikipedia says the Pope's outfit has 1.6 billion. The membership of the entire TAC is nothing more than a fluctuation in the number of Catholic baptisms in a given week -- what did the deputy principal think the TAC was going to bargain with?