I Can't Help But Compare

the positive reaction to the election and public announcement of the new Pope among centrist-to-conservative Protestant and Jewish commentators to the absolute disaster we're seeing with the ACA and its inability even to find someone to make sense out of its disintegrating Diocese of the West. Despite the very real challenges it faces from without and within, the Catholic Church gives the impression that it wants to keep its house in order. In contrast, major figures in the ACA, from Louis Falk through Brian Marsh through Anthony Morello to Mrs Bush seem almost to act from resentment of the Church Universal themselves, and certainly not from consideration of the interests of even the ACA. Might this suggest that God is not smiling on the Continuum?

The more I think about the history of the Continuum and the ACA, the more I'm seriously troubled by what's actually there. The Continuum would prefer to say it derives from the St Louis convention of 1977, in which a breakaway faction objected to The Episcopal Church's ordination of women (something nearly all Protestant denominations, as well as Reform Judaism, have proceeded to do) and its revised prayer book (done in the spirit of Vatican II). However, the Continuum is a much dirtier creature than that: the American Episcopal Church was founded by the segregationist James Dees in 1963, objecting to The Episcopal Church's (in the opinion of some, belated) integration of Southern parishes.

The AEC merged with Louis Falk's faction of the Anglican Catholic Church to form the Traditional Anglican Communion and the Anglican Church in America in 1991. Major figures from the AEC's segregationist, pre-St Louis past continue either in the ACA itself, like Robin Connors (a perennial Falk protege), or in the Anglican Province of America, which broke away from the Falk ACA following his purge of Anthony Clavier -- these include the current APA Presiding Bishop Walter Grundorf, as well as the APA's Bishop Shaver. The APA, with its segregationist history, is now mooting a re-merger with Falk's ACA.

If I had anything to do with the ACA, I'd want to have a very detailed discussion with Bishops Grundorf and Shaver, both of whom were consecrated in the segregationist AEC prior to St Louis, on the precise history and nature of their views on Civil Rights. Oh, by the way, I'd want to have someone ask Bishop Marsh what on earth he has in mind in treating with these Neanderthals at all.

But it also goes to the question of whether anyone in the ACA can be moved by conscience. That would go some distance in explaining what's happened over St Mary of the Angels.

But Bishop Shaver and Bishop Grundorf, how about a statement renouncing any connection between the APA and the AEC of James Dees, as well as an explanation of how you came to join the AEC and thrive in it, given its segregationist history? By the same token, Bishop Marsh, how about a statement of what you've done to satisfy yourself that neither Bishop Grundorf nor Bishop Shaver endorses now, nor ever did in the past, the segregationist views of the AEC's founder, James Dees?