PITTSBURGH: Group plans 'unity event'
Episcopal News Service. September 4, 2008 [090408-03]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
A coalition of Episcopal clergy and laypeople plans a September 13 event which it says is meant to promote unity in the Diocese of Pittsburgh.
The event, "A Hopeful Future for the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh: An Alternative Solution," will center on rejecting proposals that the diocesan leadership plans to use to remove the diocese from the Episcopal Church, according to a news release. Speakers will explain how continuity of the diocese as a judicatory of The Episcopal Church will be maintained irrespective of the outcome of the vote on "realignment" at the October 4 diocesan convention.
The event will be take place at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, September 13, 2008. More information is available by calling St. Paul's at (412) 531-7153 or by visiting its Web site here.
The gathering is sponsored by Across the Aisle, a coalition that the news release says grew out of conversations among conservatives, moderates, and liberals of the diocese who believe that withdrawal from the Episcopal Church and realignment with a foreign Anglican province is "neither a proper nor a helpful response to the current controversies within the Episcopal Church." The group says it has Episcopalians from more than 29 congregations of the Pittsburgh diocese.
Across the Aisle has appointed a steering committee of six: the Rev. James Simons, rector of St. Michael's of the Valley, Ligonier; the Rev. Nancy Chalfant-Walker, rector of St. Stephen's, Wilkinsburg; Mr. Charles Jarrett, chancellor emeritus of the diocese; Joan Gundersen, Church of the Redeemer, Squirrel Hill; and Thomas Moore and Mary Roehrich, both of St. Andrew's, Highland Park.
At the diocese's annual convention the first weekend in October, delegates to the convention will be asked to make the diocese a member of the Argentina-based Anglican Province of the Southern Cone.
The convention will also vote on a resolution (Resolution Two) that would give parishes two years or more to make their by-laws reflect a realignment with the Southern Cone. That resolution also allows parishes "a season of discernment about whether to accept re-alignment or to petition to break their union with Convention" and asks that "charity and generosity continue to be embraced as virtues in diocesan life where matters of fidelity and direction profoundly divide us."
A third resolution would state, in part, that although the convention would adopt the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church as advisory policies "until a more comprehensive set of Constitution and Canons can be developed and approved by the Diocese," the action "should in no way be interpreted to suggest that The Episcopal Church has any authority over the Diocese, any Parish of the Diocese, or any Clergy of the Diocese."
"We are making plans to assure continuity in the administration of the diocese," said Simons in the Across the Aisle news release. "It is with great sadness that we are undertaking these necessary preparations."
When Duncan called the annual convention for a month earlier than its traditional meeting time, he told the diocese that "the expressed threat of deposition of the diocesan bishop at a September meeting of the House of Bishops is the 'sufficient cause'" required by diocesan canon to make such a change.
The Episcopal Church's Title IV Review Committee has certified that Duncan has abandoned the communion of the Episcopal Church. Duncan denied that charge. Two of the three senior Episcopal Church diocesan bishops refused to give Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori their canonically required consent to inhibit him, based on the certification, from the performance of any episcopal, ministerial or canonical acts until a final vote by the House of Bishops on whether or not Duncan should be deposed. Such an inhibition requires the consent of all three senior bishops.