Poor Richard's Almanac

by William Murchison
May 20, 2009

Here's what people love about us Anglicans: We're anything we say we are. And it's fine with God -- if we say it is. Or as Bishop Richard Holloway might add - if there's a God to hear what we say.

Ah, Holloway! I remember him well. Interviewed him as a matter of fact in the mid-'80s. He was then, or seemed so anyway, a perfectly orthodox bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church, functioning as rector of the grand old American Episcopal parish, Church of the Advent, Boston. He was lean, learned, literate: a wonderfully fluent speaker, as well as author of the terse little books that busy clergymen write in their spare time. He questioned in our interview the validity of the Christian understanding that men alone should function as priests. Growing numbers of Anglicans, especially on ths side of the water, questioned it as well. I didn't agree, but the topic wasn't my precise business. I was the interviewer, he the interviewee.

A decade or so later, Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh. He seemed to delight in sticking a thumb in the eye of orthodox, or anyway morally conservative Christans, especially those who couldn't see, as he apparently could, the necessity of upgrading the old, censorious view of same-sex relationships. He got louder and louder about it. In due course, he made known that critics of homosexual practice were "the meanest old sods you ever saw." An odd way to put things, I thought. Didn't "sod" derive from "sodomite":-- precisely the class of citizen he was defending? the rest