Tag Archives: Primate Fred Hiltz

Fred Hiltz personally agrees with same-sex marriage

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The following article is a summary of what transpired during a question and answer session following the recent Queer Eucharist that Hiltz presided at.

The whole thing is worth a read because it illustrates well the morally chaotic universe the Anglican Church of Canada inhabits. A universe where a Primate’s personal view of same-sex marriage is at odds with the religion he is supposed to represent, where telling someone homosexual activity is wrong amounts to abuse, where the main purpose of the church appears to be not only to affirm whatever its members do no matter what but to provide them a safe space in which to do it.

From the attendees at the session, it is once again apparent that ACoC clergy promote gay marriage so strenuously because so many of them are, themselves, married to a person of the same sex.

I do see a bright future ahead for the Anglican Church of Canada, though: not so much as a church but as a gay dating agency for unattached clergy.

“All of us belong to God,” said Canon Douglas Graydon to Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, at a gathering held to discuss same-sex marriage in the Canadian church. “The question is whether we belong to the church.”

It was a question many LGBTQ Anglicans brought forward in a question and answer session that took place after a talk Hiltz gave following the “queer Eucharist” service hosted monthly at the Anglican Church of St. John’s West Toronto.

Passions ran high in the hour-long conversation, moderated by Graydon, an associate priest at St. John’s who is in a same-sex marriage. The event saw about 150 people—including several LGBTQ clergy from the diocese of Toronto—come forward to share stories of pain and discrimination, and to call on the church to honour their struggle and their equality.

“What I want from our bishops, and from our primate, is the kind of language that restores hope, that will allow a 17-year-old thinking that suicide is maybe better, to say, ‘No—no, there is hope,’” said the Rev. Alison Kemper (deacon), a professor at Ryerson University. “We are who we are, and if the Anglican church chooses to deny us, we will get married, and we will have careers and we will have churches. What you need to do is claim your authenticity as our leader.”

Her thoughts were seconded by her wife, the Rev. Joyce Barnett, incumbent at St. Matthias, Bellwoods, who stressed the importance of publicly calling out homophobia and exclusion.

[….]

The most pointed question, however, came at the end of the evening, when a young woman named Jessica Davis-Sydor asked Hiltz about his personal views on the issue.

“I never actually heard you come out and say that you supported, that you support what is going on, that you are fighting to try and get same-sex marriage in the church,” she said. “Do you fully support it, deep down, what is happening?”

Hiltz responded by saying that while he personally supports same-sex marriage in the Anglican church, his position as president of General Synod places limitations on what he can or cannot say as a representative of the Canadian church.

 

Fred Hiltz meets with “LGBTQ community”

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From here:

Yesterday, Archbishop Fred Hiltz met with more than 120 members and friends of the LGBTQ community in Toronto at celebration of the Holy Eucharist at St. John’s, West in Toronto.
[….]
Yesterday’s pastoral gathering was an opportunity for the Primate to be in dialogue with a local LGBTQ community about their lives and experiences within the Church and about the resolution that will go before the General Synod in July. Archbishop Hiltz remains deeply committed to hearing the diversity of perspectives in our church about this matter as reflected in his ongoing conversations with the Bishops of our Church, Canadian participants at the Anglican Consultative Council, Canadian and African bishops in dialogue, from theological students and faculty, and from members of the Council of the General Synod among others.

“I left the gathering more convinced than ever the need for the Church to take opportunity to hear first-hand the experiences and longings of LGBTQ persons,” Hiltz said. “So often we speak about instead of with the LGBTQ community. We all need to be creating these kinds of opportunities to have pastoral conversations.”

The group of people that Hiltz has no interest whatsoever in speaking to are Anglicans who experience same-sex attractions yet resist the temptation to act upon them. North American Anglicanism is, after all, predominantly interested in justifying acting on one’s urges not in denying them – other than giving up carbon lust during Lent, of course.

Primate Fred Hiltz pledges to lower immortality rates in 2016

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C.S. Lewis, in his essay The Weight of Glory, pointed out:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

The Anglican Church of Canada has been uncomfortable with this and other transcendent aspects of Christianity for years, so it has been labouring tirelessly to divert attention away from troubling ideas such as miracles, the final destination of man’s immortal soul, substitutionary atonement and so on, preferring, instead, to concentrate on social work, left-wing political agitation and, of course, sex.

Now, in what must be a major theological breakthrough for 2016, the Anglican Church of Canada has announced that it has found a way to reduce immortality – perhaps, eventually to banish it completely. As Fred Hiltz points out in his New Year’s Day sermon, the plan is to start with eroding the immortality of pregnant women:

This major initiative reflects a commitment to several of the Sustainable Development Goals including a lowering of the immortality rates among pregnant women.

Fred Hiltz attempts a Primates’ Meeting pre-emptive deflection manoeuvre

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Will it work? I doubt it.

Fred Hiltz would like the main discussion items at the January Primates’ meeting to be poverty, refugees, and global warming; in other words, temporal items, woes which inspire church enthusiasm of a magnitude overshadowed only by its inability to remedy them.

As much as Hiltz would like to avoid any discussion of disciplining TEC and the ACoC over their same-sex marriage preoccupation, squirm as he might, I am sure that the GAFCON primates will not let him get away with it.

From here:

A number of primates within the Anglican Communion are pushing for a Primates’ Meeting agenda that “reflects not only concerns within the domestic life of the church, but around the urgent issues within our common humanity,” said Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada.

Returning from his December 9 meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, Hiltz said he was informed by Welby that this particular call “is not coming from just certain parts of the Communion—it’s coming from every part of the Communion.”

While Hiltz acknowledged that issues around same-sex marriages will be an important topic of conversation at the meeting, he said he has encouraged Welby to make sure that the meeting’s agenda tackles important issues affecting the church and the world.

Earlier, Hiltz identified poverty, the global refugee crisis and climate change as key concerns for churches.

In an interview with the Anglican Journal, Hiltz said he was pleased with how receptive Welby was to this message. “He’s very open to that, and he said that a lot of the primates are calling for an agenda that reflects both.”

Hiltz also said that after his meeting with Welby, he came away “encouraged by his [Welby’s] clarity in terms of what the Primates’ Meeting is and what it’s not.”

The Primates’ Meeting “is not a decision-making body—it’s a body for people that come together to pray and discuss and discern and offer some guidance. We don’t make resolutions,” Hiltz said.

Since it was announced that Archbishop Foley Beach, the leader of the breakaway Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), would be present for the first part of the meeting, Hiltz said there has been concern in some quarters over whether or not attempts will be made to confront The Episcopal Church (TEC) over its decision this year to allow same-sex marriages. But Hiltz said Welby was quite clear that the meeting would not exclude any of the primates of churches that are members of the Anglican Communion.

“His principle is one of full inclusion of all the primates. I think he will encourage, and if need be, challenge, the primates to uphold that principle,” Hiltz said.

The meeting—scheduled Jan. 11-16, 2016—will be the first to be hosted by Welby since he was enthroned in 2013. The primates last met in Dublin in 2011, a meeting attended by only 23 or the 38 primates.

Hiltz said he believes part of the difficulty in getting the primates to meet arose from different understandings of the role of the Primates’ Meeting among the other instruments of the Communion. What began as a way for primates to meet for “friendly conversation” has been pushed in a more disciplinary direction, Hiltz said, which has led to some distorted understandings of how much authority primates actually have over the wider Communion.

“Within the Communion, as the Primates’ Meeting, we are called to a servant role, in terms of how we speak of, support and model servant leadership in the spirit of God’s mission,” he noted. “We’re servants of the churches in which we minister…we are called to be servants, not rulers.”

Fred Hiltz looks forward to reconciliation at the Primates’ meeting

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Fred Hiltz’s reaction – his public one, at least – to Archbishop Foley Beach’s attending the Primates’ meeting next January was a hope that he could converse his way into “reconciliation” with ACNA. To put it another way: he wants to have yet another shot at bamboozling the naïve fundamentalist conservatives that their liberal brethren don’t have horns after all.

“Reconciliation” the Hiltz way is for ACNA to peacefully co-exist with those who are in the process of draining the meaning out of marriage, who deny that Jesus is man’s only means of salvation, who have replaced the Gospel with Marxist flavoured social action, who believe the church’s primary calling is to the temporal rather than the eternal and who value money and survival over truth and integrity.

GAFCON and ACNA can only reconcile with TEC and the ACoC if both repudiate their false teaching, an event that is unlikely to occur this side of the apocalypse.

If Hiltz truly wants to reconcile, he could, as a gesture of good faith, give ANiC parishes their buildings back.

From here:

The Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Most Revd Archbishop Fred Hiltz, welcomed the meeting as “a good thing”. Speaking on Tuesday, he described the decision to invite ACNA — it is understood that the representative will be present for one day, before the formal meeting gets under way — as “an opportunity for some conversation, in the ultimate hope that we might be able to find a way forward towards reconciliation”.

Personally, I would like to see a repetition of the dramatic but, alas, unsuccessful attempt at the 1998 Lambeth conference by Nigeria’s Bishop Emmanuel Chukwuma to exorcise demons of homosexuality from Rev. Richard Kirker through the unsolicited laying on of hands. That might be too much to hope for.

Anglican Church of Canada has Companion Relationships with African Anglicans

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The Anglican Church of Canada is attempting to quell rumours of division and dissent within the Anglican Communion through something it calls Companion Relationships.

Contrary to what the Primate of the ACoC would like us to believe, though, when convincing African and Western Anglican bishops to merely sit in the same room and discuss anything other than their disagreements is viewed as a triumph of reconciliation, all it does is drive home just how broken the Anglican Communion really is.

Needless to say, it was the ACoC and TEC that did the breaking.

From here:

It was also a manifestation of what Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, had noted about the nature of relationships that exist within the Anglican Communion.

“For some people, when they think of the [Anglican] Communion, they immediately think division, dissension,” but a very different picture was evident in the companion relationships represented at this consultation, Hiltz said. He described these relationships as honest, healthy, vibrant and growing.

Although the bishop of the diocese of Central Buganda did not attend the meeting due to tensions between the church in Uganda and other parts of the Communion, Hiltz said that other clergy within that diocese attended “enthusiastically, really looking forward to the opportunity to be together and to talk across relationships.” Differences over contentious issues such as human sexuality weren’t part of the discussion “or even the subtext,” he told the Anglican Journal in an interview after he returned to Canada.

Primate Fred Hiltz goes on carbon fast for Lent

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From here:

Notable leaders who agreed to fast one day during this period include the Rev. Fred Hiltz, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada (March 6); Rev. Susan Johnson, National Bishop, Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (February 14); Rev. Mark MacDonald, the National Indigenous Bishop, Anglican Church of Canada (March 16); Mardi Tindal, Immediate Past Moderator, The United Church of Canada (March 19); Joe Gunn, Executive Director, Citizens for Public Justice (February 1); Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada (March 12); and Bill McKibben, author and co-founder of 350.org (March 30). Connie Sorio, KAIROS’ Ecological Justice Partnership Coordinator, will join the fast on February 28.

We don’t know what, exactly, these paradigms of piety have chosen to give up to reduce their carbon footprint.

Even the rarefied atmosphere that is home to this illustrious company is routinely contaminated by the demon Co2, since even they breathe in oxygen only to convert it to carbon dioxide, exhaling the filthy pollutant 28800 times per day. Here’s my suggestion for their carbon fast: hold your breath for an entire day.

One can only hope.

March 5th is climate fast day

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On March the fifth, luminaries from Canadian Anglican and Lutheran churches, along with green politicians and assorted Gaia hangers on, will fast for climate change. The fasters include well known climatologists, Bishop Fred Hiltz and Bishop Susan Johnson. I hope they are successful because the climate needs to change: it was -24C in Oakville yesterday. Personally, I have set aside March 5th to have dinner at the local Mandarin where I will eat as much as possible.

The organiser of this worthy venture is Jennifer Henry from Kairos Canada. She reckons that the justice we most desperately need is not justice for the unborn who are routinely murdered in their thousands or for the increasing number of Christians who are being beheaded, tortured or displaced in so many places but climate justice, a incoherence which has no discernible meaning since climate is an inanimate phenomenon to which it is no more possible to act unjustly than to a bowl of porridge.

Still, to look on the bright side, Bishops not eating for a whole day will considerably reduce global flatulence; now if only they could be persuaded to stop talking.

From here:

“Fasting has long roots in our faith tradition,” says Henry. “The fast that God requires is justice and the justice we most desperately need is climate justice for all people who have been impacted, and will be impacted, by the current ecological catastrophe. Fasting for one day is a small gesture of solidarity for the hardship so many now face. Each and every one of our voices is essential to demand of the federal government an effective strategy to meet science-based emissions reductions targets in the lead up to the climate conference in Paris later this year.”

February and March are assigned to North Americans who are hungry for action on climate change. Notable leaders who agreed to fast one day during this period include the Rev. Fred Hiltz, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada (March 6); Rev. Susan Johnson, National Bishop, Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (February 14); Rev. Mark MacDonald, the National Indigenous Bishop, Anglican Church of Canada (March 16); Mardi Tindal, Immediate Past Moderator, The United Church of Canada (March 19); Joe Gunn, Executive Director, Citizens for Public Justice (February 1); Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada (March 12); and Bill McKibben, author and co-founder of 350.org (March 30). Connie Sorio, KAIROS’ Ecological Justice Partnership Coordinator, will join the fast on February 28.

Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada to combine synods in 2019

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A conjoining of the likeminded, a consolidation of withering, a pooling of unbelief, a unified witness of doubt to an indifferent world, a belated smokescreen to conceal decades of intellectual inbreeding.

Or, perhaps, a desperate attempt to endure for a few more years.

The article below makes it clear that this has nothing to do with survival; nothing at all.

The Anglican Church of Canada and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) have approved in principle a plan to hold a second joint assembly in 2019.

[…]

Hiltz said the report [a report from the Joint Anglican and Lutheran Commission] emphasized the point that for the majority of those ministries, the choice to work together was made from “a position of strength for common witness,” not from a survivalist point of view.

Fred Hiltz presented with “Homeless Jesus replica”

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From here:

Primate receives Homeless Jesus replica

Amidst the presentations and discussions, Council of General Synod (CoGS) also included a moment of giving when Andy Seal, director of Augsburg Fortress Canada, presented Archbishop Fred Hiltz with a miniature replica of Canadian artist Timothy Schmalz’s widely acclaimed Homeless Jesus sculpture.

When I first saw the sculptor’s name, I read it as “Schmaltz”, probably because his statue brought to mind the ubiquitous sentimental plastic Marys for sale in Lourdes. It is only fitting that a Jesus replica – homeless or otherwise – be presented to the head of the Anglican Church of Canada whose object of worship has become – a Jesus replica.