Matt Kennedy+: Rector’s Journal: An Ominous Sign

Monday, June 2, 2008

Dear Vestry, I had an opportunity to speak to the bishop while down in New Orleans. We had a good conversation. He acknowledged that the national church was actively discouraging the sort of deals that we want to work out, but said that the national church was not going to force his hand, especially if the deal that we work out is quiet and there is little publicity. I asked whether our departure would trigger a lawsuit. He said no.

There was relative silence from the diocese during the first few months of 2007. There were, of course, great happenings on the Communion level. The primates met in Tanzania in February 2007 and issued the now irrelevant Dar Es Salaam Communique subsequently ignored by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the House of Bishops in New Orleans. The "Windsor Process" devolved and disintegrated into the "Covenant Process" as it became more and more evident that there would be no discipline of the Episcopal Church.

The Diocese of Central New York had more pressing concerns than the status of Good Shepherd. The wheels were starting to come off of the diocese's contrived, trumped up, and ultimately failed case against Fr. Bollinger, former Rector of St. Paul's, Owego who had openly questioned the dioceses' failure to pursue accusations of sexual abuse against one of his predecessors. The lawsuit against St. Andrew's Syracuse had not gone well and the bishop was beginning to feel the heat for his legal adventurism. The rest at Stand Firm