The Green Zone

Why was it impossible for orthodox Anglicans to get their act together? Why did so few bishops lead their flock out of Babylon? What should we do now? What can we do?

From Touchstone (my emphases):

For more than thirty years now I have been an observer and sometime participant in what I will here call the conservative Episcopalian mess. The departure of more orthodox Episcopalians from an apostatizing mainstream headed by weak and clownish English archbishops and astoundingly aggressive heretics in North America, contained no real surprises, for this is the predictable fruit of religious liberalism hatched upon an ignorant, passive, and venal laity, that we have seen in other major Protestant churches, and from which modern Roman Catholicism, especially under a Nice Pope, is unlikely to be much of a refuge.

What I have found somewhat surprising, I suppose because my knowledge of the ecclesial geography was not very deep early on, was what a hard time conservative Anglicans have had getting their act (literally) together. Now to be sure, my “geographical” knowledge has increased over the years, so that I understand quite well that “conservative” applies to a number of incompatible or barely compatible attitudes. It covers the traditionalist for whom a charge of heresy applies to any change from the 1928 Prayer Book (even though that Prayer Book is a liberalization of older ones—it leaves out, for example, the bride’s charge to “obey”), to the dotty eccentrics of many varieties for which this Church is so famous, to those who reject women’s ordination principally because they are homosexual misogynists, to the odd clerical ducks for whom departure from the Episcopal Church gave them the chance to become bishops (the Volo Episcoparis and their numerous episcopi vagantes), to sober, reasonable, and catholic-minded Christians who loved the beauties of the most liturgically traditional, least sectarian-minded, and most cultured of Protestant churches.

And now ... the bitter (albeit predictable) fruit.

From Mr. Esolen:

The new odium Christi is a hatred of the moral teachings of Jesus, hatred preached in the name of Jesus himself, sometimes by preachers in churches riddled with termites, and sometimes by licentious scoundrels who want what they want, and there's an end on it. A sinner with a bad conscience might glance up from his sty should he hear the Lord say, "If a man but look upon a woman with lust, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart." So instead we give him Jesus the Anti-Christ, who resolutely never said a thing about sins of the flesh.