David Virtue On TEC Bishop Love's Options

David Virtue has been covering the controversy over Episcopalian Bishop of Albany William Love, who has refused to accept same-sex marriage in his diocese, although the TEC General Convention has approved it. He discusses Love's options:

1. He can retire and leave the mess for someone else. That seems unlikely. He is not a quitter and he is fighting now and will continue to do so until he retires. It is highly unlikely that he would abandon his mostly Anglo-Catholic priests.

2. He could ask the diocese if it would consider resigning en masse and align with the ACNA. But this is fraught with legal land mines, resulting in his immediate inhibition, presentment and expulsion, and the real possibility that all the parishes would lose their buildings. The diocese doesn't have the money for a protracted legal battle and probably not the stomach for it either.

3. If he loses the ecclesiastical battle in a trial, and that could happen, that is, General Convention resolutions override diocesan canon laws, then he could face presentment and be tossed out of the church, thus paving the way for a new bishop.

. . .

5. This could result in wholesale resignations by priests in the diocese who may feel they have no future with a bishop who does not share their Catholic faith. Furthermore, with some 16 parishes unable now to pay their diocesan dues, it is likely that a wholesale revolt by the remaining parishes would virtually bankrupt the diocese.

6. Anglo Catholicism is in trouble in general and more so in towns still heavily dominated by a sterile Roman Catholicism.

Virtue's overall analysis of Love's position vis-a-vis The Episcopal Church is realistic, I think, but it's significant that he doesn't see Anglicanorum coetibus anywhere in the range of options, which is also a realistic point of view. A potential option for the diocese is to go with the ACNA, although the legal consequences would be self-defeating. The same would apply to a hypothetical move into the North American ordinariate, which let's recall was originally conceived in the late 1970s as a version of "continuing" Anglicanism, a corporate refuge for conservative parishes and conceivably dioceses disaffected with the TEC controversy-of-the-year.

Virtue thinks there could be wholesale resignations by priests, but of course, the dog that isn't barking is the essentially non-existent option for them to become priests in the ordinariate -- TEC priests who have been rectors of successful parishes and then become Catholic ordinariate priests for purely doctrinal reasons have been quite rare after the first wave. The intake has been primarily from fringe Anglican or non-Anglican denominations and men who haven't had established careers.

While Virtue's use of the term "Anglo Catholicism" is imprecise here, I think he's correct in seeing it as having only boutique appeal even in the North American ordinariate. There are "affirming" Episcopalian Anglo-Catholic parishes that are successful in upscale urban communities like midtown Manhattan and Hollywood. But that form of Anglo-Catholicism isn't even all that prevalent in the ordinariate. And it's worth pointing out that the most punctilious liturgical observance in the TEC Anglo-Catholic parishes goes with wholehearted acceptance of TEC's positions on sexuality. Liturgy by itself accomplishes nothing.

While I certainly disagree with Virtue theologically, I think he's an accurate observer of the dilemma facing high-church Protestantism. The outcome is not conversion to Catholicism, it's a general falling away from Christianity.

Cloning "continuing" Anglicanism hasn't been an effective strategy. Liturgy by itself isn't a solution, and it hasn't been uniformly applied even within the ordinariate.