Spong Ends Dialogue, Assails Vatican Act
Episcopal News Service. September 18, 1980 [80317]
NEWARK, N.J. -- Claiming that "sexual wholeness in ministry" took precedent over ecumenical dialogue, the Episcopal Bishop of Newark has suspended conversations with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and Diocese of Paterson.
Bishop John S. Spong announced the steps in a eucharist at Trinity Cathedral here in which he said that the recently announced Vatican decision to accept dissident former Episcopalians and to allow former priests to become Roman Catholic priests was "personally insulting" to women priests.
"It is my feeling that in the light of this recent action by the Roman Catholic Church, the continuation of conversations aimed at a covenant relationship might be interpreted as a violation of the integrity of the Episcopal Church, " Spong said, "or as an insult to, or compromise of our women priests."
He called off the scheduled January meeting with representatives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark and the neighboring Diocese of Paterson "until the ecumenical climate is more conducive to significant progress and real results."
In response, Archbishop Peter L. Gerety of Newark said he regretted "exceedingly that Bishop Spong feels obliged to postpone our conversations which have been looking toward covenant relationships between our two churches." He expressed the hope that "friendly relations" would soon be reestablished.
Spong said Episcopal priests had joined the Roman Catholic Church before and that his church had also received some Catholic priests, but that the unilateral Vatican action was an "unprecedented involvement by a sister communion in the internal affairs of the Episcopal Church."
Citing the Roman Catholic exclusion of women from the priesthood, the priestly vows of celibacy and the ban on artificial birth control, the bishop declared, "Sexism in the Roman Catholic Church is a painfully obvious and present phenomenon."
The absorption of women into the priesthood was "well under way when this clumsy intervention into the Episcopal tension was introduced by the Roman Catholic action," Spong said. "If the Episcopal Church must fight our sister Roman Catholic communion in order to affirm the full role of women, then sadly we will do so."
Spong's action is the harshest yet taken among the 93 domestic diocesan bishops of the Church although many have called the decision a setback to ecumenical talks. The only reaction leaning the other way was a statement issued by Bishop Joseph T. Heistand of Arizona and his Roman Catholic counterpart in which they declared the arrangement to be a great ecumenical advance.