Tag Archives: John Sentamu

Archbishops of Canterbury and York call for pastoral care for homosexuals

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From here:

“Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ

In recent days, questions have been asked about the Church of England’s attitude to new legislation in several countries that penalises people with same-sex attraction. In answer to these questions, we have recalled the common mind of the Primates of the Anglican Communion, as expressed in the Dromantine Communiqué of 2005.

The  Communiqué said;

‘….we wish to make it quite clear that in our discussion and assessment of moral appropriateness of specific human behaviours, we continue unreservedly to be committed to the pastoral support and care of homosexual people.

The victimisation or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us. We assure homosexual people that they are children of God, loved and valued by Him and deserving the best we can give – pastoral care and friendship.’

We hope that the pastoral care and friendship that the Communiqué described is accepted and acted upon in the name of the Lord Jesus.

We call upon the leaders of churches in such places to demonstrate the love of Christ and the affirmation of which the Dromantine communiqué speaks.”

Yours in Christ,

+Justin Cantuar   +Sentamu Eboracensis

The church, once again, is permitting its agenda to be set more by cultural priorities – and there can be little doubt that our society is obsessively preoccupied with homosexuality – than God’s. If it were the other way around, I can’t help suspecting that there would be at least the occasional ecclesiastical Communiqué calling for protection for the unborn. But that, of course, is not something that would be universally popular and the last thing that Western Anglicanism is interested in is being less than culturally relevant.

As expected, the emphasis is on pastoral care for same-sex attracted individuals – so long as no one is encouraged to resist same-sex attraction. This will inexorably lead, as we have discovered in North America, to blanket approval of homosexual activity within committed, faithful, monogamous relationships.

The Church of England continues to ponder what ails society

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And continues to get it wrong. This time it’s the archbishop of York, John Sentamu, who tells us that inequality, specifically income inequality, has caused, among other things, violence, drug abuse, “self-harm” and mental illness.

Why does a church whose prescription for alleviating humanity’s angst ought to be spiritual, centred on personal sin and redemption through Christ, peddle materialistic leftist twaddle instead?

Is it ashamed of its own Gospel? Has it replaced the message of salvation with the message of social engineering?

What is particularly risible about John Sentamu’s faith in equality, is that only totalitarianism can make people equal: in practice, equally miserable, squalid, impoverished, brutalised and hellish.

Read it all here:

Drug abuse and violence are rife. Mental illness seems to have become more common, not simply better recognised, over the last generation or so. Rates of self-harm among teenage girls are also high and seem to be increasing. Personal debt has hit a record high.

So what has gone wrong? What has caused the loss of paradise? David Cameron said two years ago: “Research by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, in The Spirit Level, has shown that among the richest countries, it’s the more unequal ones that do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator.”

 

 

Clerical Temper Tantrums in High Places

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Rowan Williams and John Sentamu engaging in shouting matches with the opposition, bishops sulking in the lavatory and onlookers bursting into tears sounds like an episode of a TV reality show:  The Bachelor Bishop, perhaps. But no, it’s just another humdrum bishop’s selection committee meeting.

From here:

Church of England tied in knots over allowing gay men to become bishops.

The fraught divisions have been laid bare in the leak of an anguished and devastating memorandum written by the Very Rev Colin Slee, the former dean of Southwark Cathedral, shortly before his death from pancreatic cancer last November. Dr Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, and John Sentamu, the archbishop of York, vetoed candidates from becoming bishops of the south London diocese.

The document reveals shouting matches and arm-twisting by the archbishops to keep out the diocese’s preferred choices as bishop: Jeffrey John, the gay dean of St Albans, and Nicholas Holtam, rector of St Martin-in-the-Fields in central London, whose wife was divorced many years ago. Eventually Christopher Chessun, then an assistant bishop, was chosen.

[……]

“The archbishop of Canterbury was bad tempered throughout. When it came to voting, certainly two – possibly three – members were in tears and [Williams] made no acknowledgement but carried on regardless. At a critical point Archbishop Sentamu and three other members simultaneously went to the lavatory, after which the voting patterns changed.”

What an extraordinary mess – one created by the ambiguous attitude of the Anglican Church to the nature of homosexuality, an attitude that is unlikely to come down definitively on one side or the other of the issue any time soon.

So, at critical moments,  we can look forward to many more archbishops retreating to the toilet to powder their noses as the church continues to fracture, the pews empty and the Indaba groups multiply like maggots on a corpse.