The leader of Greece's influential Orthodox Church, Archbishop Christodoulos, has cancer in his large intestine and liver, doctors said Thursday.
Christodoulos, who has helped thaw centuries of tension with the Vatican but is often accused of meddling in domestic politics, has been hospitalized since June 9, and has already undergone intestinal surgery.
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The 68-year-old Orthodox leader's illness has led to an outpouring of sympathy in a country where 97 percent of the population is baptized Orthodox Christian. Even officials who have criticized him for meddling in state affairs have visited him in the hospital.
Elected Church leader in 1998, Christodoulos received the late Pope John Paul II in 2001 in the first visit by a pontiff to the Orthodox country in nearly 1,300 years.
Christodoulos followed up last year with a historic visit to the Vatican, where he met Pope Benedict XVI.
Appearing on a live webcast, the Episcopal Church's presiding bishop began the painful task Wednesday of persuading members to roll back their support for gays - at least for now - so the denomination can keep its place in the world Anglican fellowship.
The Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, who personally supports ordaining partnered gays, told a studio audience, callers and those who submitted questions by e-mail that they should make concessions that Anglican leaders are seeking to buy time for reconciliation.
"To live together in Christian community means each member takes seriously the concerns and needs of other members,'' Jefferts Schori said. "If we can lower the emotional reactivity in the midst of this current controversy, we just might be able to find a way to live together.''
Asked whether she was abandoning gay and lesbian Christians, Jefferts Schori said, "My view hasn't changed, but I'm called to be pastor to the whole church.''
The ARCIC (Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission) saga of the past three days has been insane. It all started with this article in the London Times, which I disregarded (other than the fact that it was in the Times which intrigued me) because it sounded exaggerated.
Well, apparently I was right. You have this statement from the Holy See today (via VIS):
Made public today was a note signed by Catholic Archbishop John Bathersby and Anglican Bishop David Beetge, co-presidents of the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM), regarding an article published yesterday in the British newspaper "The Times" on the IARCCUM document: "Growing Together in Unity and Mission."
"'Growing Together in Unity and Mission' has not yet been officially published," the English-language note reads. "It is unfortunate that is contents have been prematurely reported in a way which misrepresents its intentions and sensationalizes its conclusions. The first part of the document, which treats doctrinal matters, is an attempt to synthesize the work of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) over the past 35 years. It identifies the level of agreement which has been reached by ARCIC, but is also very clear in identifying ongoing areas of disagreement, and in raising questions which still need to be addressed in dialogue. Those ongoing questions and areas of disagreement are highlighted in boxed sections interspersed throughout the text. It is a very honest document assessing the state of Anglican-Roman Catholic relations at the present moment."
The note continues: "The Times article speculates about the Catholic Church's response to a possible schism within the Anglican Communion. It should be pointed out that the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity has consistently spoken of the value of the Anglican Communion remaining a communion, rooted in the Apostolic faith, as indicated in this statement from 2004: 'It is our overwhelming desire that the Anglican Communion stays together, rooted in the historic faith which our dialogue and relations over four decades have led us to believe that we share to a large degree'."
Read Ruth Gledhill's blog (the Times' religion correspondent). She has several interesting posts. This one is about how Katherine Jefferts Schori, the lightning rod for much of the tension at the meeting, has been elected to the all-important Standing Committee.
Anglican leaders demanded Monday that the U.S. Episcopal Church unequivocally bar official prayers for gay couples and the consecration of more gay bishops to undo the damage that North Americans have caused the Anglican family.
In a statement ending a tense six-day meeting, the leaders said that past pledges by Episcopalians for a moratorium on gay unions and consecrations have been so ambiguous that they have failed to fully mend ``broken relationships'' in the 77 million-member Anglican Communion.
The Episcopal Church, the U.S. wing of world Anglicanism, must clarify its position by Sept. 30 or its relations with other Anglicans will remain ``damaged at best.''
Roman Catholics will soon become the largest religious group in Great Britain, outnumbering Anglicans for the first time since the Reformation, the London Times reports.
Weekly Mass attendance at Catholic parishes now stands at about 1 million, roughly equal to the number attending Anglican services. But the Catholic population of Britain is steadily expanding, mostly because of immigration, while the Anglican community is in decline, the Times observes.
The Anglican Primate meeting in Tanzania this week has the possibility to be explosive. The First Things blog has a great analysis that is great for those who want a primer before the stuff hits the fan:
“I fear schism,” Rowan Williams told the BBC, and with good reason. Today the annual meeting of the Anglican Communion officially begins in Tanzania, and it is not at all clear that the communion will last the week. No fewer than thirty-seven Anglican archbishops have assembled at a hotel in Dar-es-Salaam, charged with the task of deciding what to do about the communion’s recalcitrant American branch, otherwise known as the Episcopal Church. Archbishop Williams’ biggest problem is that not all the archbishops are on speaking terms with one another. “I fear the situation slipping out of my control,” he went on to tell the BBC. Indeed, it may already have done so.
Archbishop Williams, in a sermon last summer titled “The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today,” noted that Anglicans have uneasily coexisted for generations as three distinct groups in one church: evangelicals, catholics, and liberals. Part of being an Anglican, he argued, is believing that all three groups have something to learn from one another. Most Christians would agree with his point. But the practical difficulty of it is that the three groups increasingly live in separate thought-worlds, each with its own distinct vocabularies and ideas about what it means to be a Christian. These divisions, long simmering beneath the surface of the maddeningly diverse Anglican brew, have now come to the surface in Tanzania. If this week’s meeting results in serious schism—which is a very distinct possibility—it will be because the three camps finally prove unable to talk to one another, and hence go their separate ways.
He goes on to analyze each of the three groups. Seems like a sharp analysis and worth a read.
ATTLEBORO -- The wave of defections that has rocked the Episcopal Church since the ordination of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop in 2003 has reached the liberal Diocese of Massachusetts, where one congregation has severed its ties to the national church. Nearly two dozen others across New England have disassociated themselves from the church's teachings on gay clergy, homosexuality, and salvation.
In the first of what adherents of traditional Anglican doctrine in the United States say will be a string of defections, the Attleboro congregation that for 115 years was known as All Saints Episcopal Church has changed its name to All Saints Anglican Church and affiliated itself with the Anglican Province of Rwanda.
And in a step many see as preliminary to following the lead of All Saints, 23 other churches in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the region have joined the Anglican Communion Network, an organization of US congregations that do not accept current Episcopal teachings on the controversial topics.
"It seems we are at the moment of fracture," said the Rev. William L. Murdoch of All Saints Church in West Newbury, who is the leader of the disaffected churches in New England.
The Rev. Lance K. Giuffrida , an Episcopal minister for 28 years and pastor of All Saints in Attleboro for the last five, said, "We did not want to go. We thought we could turn this around. We were wrong."
