Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 5:28am

Prayer When It Suits Them

 

Pro-abort Senator Diane Feinstein, (D.CA)  at her press conference yesterday at which she displayed the guns she wants to ban, had it begin with a prayer by Episcopalian Canon Gary Hall, who runs the laughingly entitled Episcopalian “National Cathedral” in Washington, DC.  Canon Hall made news for himself earlier in the week by announcing that same-sex “marriages” would be performed at the “National Cathedral”.  I found it intriguing that a representative of a dying church would be tagged to baptize Feinstein’s gun grabbing efforts.

The Episcopal Church is clearly rotting away.

Self-reported statistics provided by the denomination this month show that the church has dropped from 2,006,343 members in 2009 to 1,951,907 in 2010, the most recent reporting year. The loss of 54,436 members increases the annual rate of decline from 2 percent to 3 percent, outpacing the most recently reported declines in most other mainline churches. The church’s 10-year change in active members has dropped 16 percent.

A branch of the otherwise fast-growing 80 million member worldwide Anglican Communion, the third largest family of Christian churches globally, the Episcopal Church had also seen a steady decrease in the number of parishes, losing or closing over 100 in 2010, as well as a drop in attendance from 682,963 in 2009 to 657,831 in 2010, a 4 percent drop. Fifty-four percent of all U.S. Episcopal Churches suffered attendance loss over the prior year. Over the last decade, attendance was down 23 percent.
The denomination, which once claimed over 3.5 million members as recently as the mid-1960s, has lost over 40 percent of membership even while the U.S. population grew by over 50 percent.

 

 

Why this is occurring is easy to determine by reading an article on Canon Gary Hall at The American Spectator.

Unlike some of his predecessors, Hall is not content to host conversational forums with authors and poets or preside over high-profile funerals like those of Gerald Ford and Neil Armstrong. From calling in December for new firearms restrictions, to announcing last week that the massive gothic church is available for gay weddings, Hall embraces liberal causes as easily as he dismisses traditional Christianity.


Previous generations of liberal Episcopal clergy often spoke in layers of obfuscation; discovering the heretical teaching buried in their writing and preaching required hours of decoding. Hall represents a younger generation of liberal Episcopalians who resemble nothing so much as Unitarian Universalists decked out in stoles and surplices; they are quick to denounce those who advocate historic Christian teaching—especially moral teaching—as intolerant perpetrators of injustice who must be silenced.

In an October interview with the Detroit Free PressHall announced that he is, “not about trying to convert someone to Christianity. I don’t feel I’m supposed to convert Jews or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or Native Americans to Christianity so that they can be saved. That’s not an issue for me.”

Hall was also forthcoming about the fact that he finds common cause with those who do not profess a faith in Jesus Christ.

“I have much more in common with progressive Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists than I do with certain people in my own tradition, with fundamentalist Christians,” Hall declared. “The part of Christianity I stand with is the part in which we can live with ambiguity and with pluralism.”

Go here to read the rest.  Once upon a time the Episcopal Church was the church of most of the elites in our society:  the Old Money, the WASP aristocracy.  It was not uncommon for Protestants, and a few Catholics, as they climbed the social ladder, to join the Episcopal Church as a sign of “having arrived”.    No more.  The Episcopal Church is a dying church where Christianity has been supplanted by Leftist politics.  It was therefore completely fitting and proper for Feinstein to wheel out a representative of that dying church to baptize the latest Leftist crusade du jour.  Prayer will be tolerated on the Left when it comes from a representative of their faith and only then.  The Episcopal Church is truly the modern Democrat party at prayer.  Alas for the survival of the Episcopal Church that does not include most Democrats bothering to get up early on a Sunday to hear political harangues at what passes for sermons in most Episcopal churches these days.  God talk when it is useful is OK for them in small doses, but every week would be too much, even when presented in an all enveloping Leftist wrapper.

 

 

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philip
philip
Friday, January 25, AD 2013 4:54am

Hall sounds as though he has given up reading and following Holy scripture and 2nd Jn 1:9 comes to mind; “Whosoever revolteth, and continueth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God.” No conversions Hall stated.
He is a heretic.

Pauli
Friday, January 25, AD 2013 7:33am

Self-reported statistics provided by the denomination this month show that the church has dropped from 2,006,343 members in 2009 to 1,951,907 in 2010, the most recent reporting year.

Maybe classification of Episcopal sermons as “assault weapons” should be explored.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, January 25, AD 2013 9:23am

They’re still waving them blood-stained, little shirts.

They have no decency. They desperately need distractions, hysteria, and out-right lies to divert people’s attention from the massive economic mess they created.

Such guys make it up as they go.

And, lying, vile liberals are “trading up.” “Patriotism” or “What about the children!” were fall back positions.

Now, add morally destitute, pisky prayers.

That there are close to 2 million signed up with this so-called religious institution says more about those people than about the institution.

Pinky
Pinky
Friday, January 25, AD 2013 2:09pm

The national cathedral in the US, to the extent there is one, is St. Patrick’s in New York, the Saddleback Church in California, or the Salt Lake Temple. When the presidential and VP candidates, the Senate Majority Leader, the Speaker of the house, and the nine, ahem, “finest” legal minds in the country don’t include one mainstream Protestant, it’s time to stop pretending that they represent the heart of American thought.

Art Deco
Friday, January 25, AD 2013 3:24pm

The Washington cathedral is a very handsome piece of architecture. It is a great pity that it has fallen into the hands of this buffoon.

Go here to read the rest. Once upon a time the Episcopal Church was the church of most of the elites in our society: the Old Money, the WASP aristocracy. It was not uncommon for Protestants, and a few Catholics, as they climbed the social ladder, to join the Episcopal Church as a sign of “having arrived”. No more. The Episcopal Church is a dying church where Christianity has been supplanted by Leftist politics.

James Hashcookies Pike, disgraced ‘Bishop’ of California, among them. In a letter to his mother, “Almost everyone at our social level is an Episcopalian. An RC or a straight protestant is as rare as hen’s teeth.” (See Joan Didion’s White Album).

You could call it ‘leftist politics’, but ‘cloying mush’ might get closer to it. I was at one time a member of a ‘young adults’ discussion circle at an Anglican parish. We scarcely ever had a serious discussion of anything. Would you believe, though, that two individuals from that small discussion circle later repaired to the seminary and were subsequently ordained? One has in the intervening years had stable employment as a rector, the other not. They are both bloggers; one is much more opinionated than the other.

A Catholic priest of my acquaintance once said this, “I want to get to heaven, and I want to take you with me’. It is impossible to imagine such clarity of purpose from an Anglican vicar. I knew those two satisfactorily well, but I could not tell you then or now what their lodestars were (or are) or why they thought they had a vocation. One has a soft spot for Latin American reds (and Planned Parenthood) and the other for homosexual men. The best explanation I have ever heard of the behavior of clergymen like this (courtesy Leon Podles) is that they sought ordination because they wanted to be den mothers.

Then again, who’d want to talk to this guy?

Art Deco
Friday, January 25, AD 2013 3:33pm

His remarks are in three sections. The insipid prayer is at the end, the policy jabber (revealing he knows next-to-nothing about the issue at hand) in the middle, and a self-referential spiel at the beginning. And you know what? It is a textbook performance. For upwards of 30 years, Anglican communicants have been treated to clergy making fools of themselves in just this way.

Jon
Jon
Friday, January 25, AD 2013 4:11pm

Art Deco, it’s appropriate that you mention Bishop James Pike, since he was one of the ‘new’ clergymen who did much to accelerate decline in the Episcopal Church. His agendas were mostly political and of the leftist sort, and his attendance at a seance was of course highly heterodox. Incidentally, he died a rather strange death: He ran out of water while travelling through the desert.

Jon
Jon
Friday, January 25, AD 2013 4:13pm

I find far more troubling the presiding bishop Schori. I can’t seem to pin her down though she strikes me as gnostic.

Art Deco
Friday, January 25, AD 2013 5:30pm

Art Deco, it’s appropriate that you mention Bishop James Pike, since he was one of the ‘new’ clergymen who did much to accelerate decline in the Episcopal Church.

The House of Bishops did not have the cojones to put him in front of an ecclesiastical tribunal, though the bill of particulars was quite considerable (canonically invalid marriage, serial adultery, and, what was publicly well-known, heresy). He resigned in 1966 and saved them the trouble. He was the first of many rogues not properly disciplined.

Jon
Jon
Friday, January 25, AD 2013 6:13pm

Forgot about the serial adultery. Yes, he stood in stark contrast to the Rev. Richard Emrich, whose book “We Hold these Truths” represented the epitome of everything the Episcopal church and much of our society once stood for.

Agnes B. Bullock
Saturday, January 26, AD 2013 11:53am

Isn’t he the grandson of Woodrow Wilson?

trackback
Monday, January 28, AD 2013 6:13am

[…] Prayer When It Suits Them – Donald R. McClarey, The American Catholic […]

Pauli
Monday, January 28, AD 2013 2:30pm

I’m starting a Catholic gun rights and education group. Most of the blogging activity will occur here under the tag Defending Your Family. Anyone who is interested may email me here or just leave a comment. There are no dues and the list of members and supporters will be kept totally private.

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