- Why did he accept Bp Lopes's invitation to visit?
- Why did Bp Lopes invite him in the first place?
The bishop’s article was interesting, but really why did he go? Why go somewhere to get yourself annoyed? Odd that he didn’t sit in choir.My regular correspondent added the comment:I don’t understand why he made a fuss about the so-called lack of Eucharistic hospitality. He knows the rules. Many of the more conservative Orthodox would have made him sit in the narthex, to say nothing of receiving holy communion. A Western heretic, no less. Try that at S. Anthony in the desert, Florence, AZ, or on Athos!
Every church has the right to determine who may receive or not.
I think the point was that at a more obviously "Roman" mass he would have been quite aware that they didn't want his kind in the communion line-up. [Fr ____ would put this more pastorally, of course.] At something that seemed so "Anglican" it was harder to remember that the familiar liturgy was just window-dressing and he was still persona non grata. Why did he go? Why did Bp Lopes ask him? He had a lot of TEC bishops to choose from. Springfield is not exactly next door.Another visitor put this more in the context of question 2 above:
I wonder why [Lopes] invited Bp. Martins, since Martins is an unapologetic practitioner of women's ordination, even if he is "orthodox" on other matters (I don't know for sure that he is; in any event, he once was). Moreover, Mme Jefferts-Schori was the chief consecrator at his episcopal consecration on March 19, 2011.My first reaction is to theorize that pretty much any TEC bishop is broad-church, especially if we revisit the Australian controversy several years ago, in which retired Bishop of Newark, USA John Shelby Spong visitied Australia at the invitation of Australia’s Anglican Primate Phillip Aspinall of Brisbane. When Archbishop of Sydney Jensen denied Bishop Spong access to the pulpits of Sydney, Archbishop Aspinall extended an invitation for Spong to preach in Brisbane’s St. John’s Cathedral.I don't think that there are, in fact, any diocesan bishops in TEC that don't ordain women (not counting the bishops of the "seceded dioceses" of Fort Worth, Quincy, and San Joaquin; the TEC bishops of the "unionist" dioceses of Fort Worth and San Joaquin do, while Quincy has been "junctioned" into the Diocese of Chicago).
Bishop William Love of the Diocese of Albany, NY holds much the same views as Martins on these subjects (he ordains women, but is otherwise "orthodox"); he was, however, consecrated in January 2006 when Frank Griswold was still PB.
Bishop George Sumner of Dallas (from 2015) probably holds similar views as well, but since he was previously Principal of Wycliffe College, Toronto I imagine he would be on the Protestant/Evangelical side of the Anglican spectrum.
The political impulse of any Anglican bishop is going to be to avoid controversy; the best answer for Abp Aspinall is to say that both Spong and Jensen are good Anglicans. (This may even have been pre-scripted Kabuki -- Jensen makes a move to satisfy the right; Aspinall smoothes it over to satisfy the left.) If the winds blow for women's ordination, a TEC bishop will set his or her sails. Even Jeffrey Steenson, as TEC Bishop of the Rio Grande, simply delegated the job of ordaining women to a suffragan, and he concelebrated masses with women without a problem.
So my guess is that Bp Martins's remarks on not receiving the sacrament were calculated, although they certainly came off as churlish. If I'm invited to a dinner party and know the host serves kosher, for instance, I'm not sure how I'm entitled to complain that there wasn't bacon with the hors d'oeuvres. But such complaints presumably aren't directed at an audience that would find them ignorant or churlish.
I think the key can be found in the question Martins asks toward the end of the piece:
Do the ordinariates in fact undermine unity by bleeding off the motivation for the hard ecumenical conversations that are necessary?I'm not sure how realistically Bp Martins envisions any ecumenical discussion that addressed the sort of "hard" questions he might pose. It sounds as though his side in imaginary negotiations would demand some form of women's ordination from Rome, but he'd allow Rome not to have same-sex unions, or maybe let Rome put them up to the local bishop. He's in never-never land.
But maybe, as might have been the case in Australia, this is all a calculated move by Martins, and the churlishness in his essay is meant to reassure his lower-church constituency back in Illinois, or among the House of Bishops generally -- and perhaps Martins said different things to Bp Lopes in private. But I doubt it.
Bp Martins, though, strikes me as a gamesman with sound perceptions of the world as it exists, and I find no reason to disagree with his assessment that Anglicanorum coetibus appeals only to the Anglo-Catholic fringe, and it fundamentally misunderstands Anglicanism. On that, I think Martins has much the clearer vision. Perhaps I'll explain how this relates to J.P.Morgan and Ralph Adams Cram tomorrow.
