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First of all, I want to thank your Rector for inviting me to participate in the bicentennial celebration of Christ Church, Cooperstown.  I bring you congratulations and best wishes from the Church of the Good Shepherd in Toronto.  Next year, 2011, we will be celebrating our centennial.  

Last month I went to the Holy Land with my area bishop to take a course at St. George’s College, Jerusalem, on “The Palestine of Jesus.”  Since there were vacant places in the class, a number of people registered from south of the (Canadian) border: a retired couple from Baltimore, a priest from North Carolina, and a young mother married to a seminarian studying in Alexandria, Virginia. 

Outside my room was a plaque commemorating the founding of the church in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and on the main floor was a memorial to Stephen Bayne, Bishop of Olympia.  Bishop Bayne was Acting Dean of the General Theological Seminary in New York City when I came there in 1973, the first Roman Catholic to teach at the institution where my grandfather had studied for the priesthood, after fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. 

The two issues under discussion at that time were Prayer Book revision and women’s ordination.  As a Roman Catholic, I obviously had no role in the former discussion, but I was asked to provide an ecumenical perspective on the second issue.  Another invited participant in that discussion was Eugene Fairweather.  Little did I guess that, in some years time, I would be joining him at the Toronto School of Theology. 

When asked for my opinion on women’s ordination, I said I thought the most important consideration was the good of the Episcopal Church.  Whatever ecumenical fall-out there might be was strictly secondary. 

Fast forward 30 years, and our churches find themselves with yet another hot potato, one which also has ecumenical consequences.  The American and Canadian churches reached the same decision on women’s ordination, but we have followed different paths on the same-sex issue.  In 2003 the Diocese of New Hampshire chose an openly gay man as its bishop, whereas our General Synod moved this year to put off yet again the issue of same-sex blessings. 

Several years ago a senior Canadian churchman declared the Anglican Communion to be “dysfunctional.”  Time will tell whether that judgment was sound, but I personally believe that the Communion can only survive if we can learn to live and let live.  If that is too much to ask from the two sides of the theological divide, then I must come back to the judgment I made years ago at General Theological Seminary: the well-being of the local church has priority; the fall-out for the Communion must take second place. 

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, in language derived from his Pharisaic heritage, “I delivered unto you that which I also received” (1 Corinthians 15:3).  During my 38 years in the Roman Catholic Church I came to appreciate the importance of tradition in preserving a religious culture. 

Here in North America we live in a post-Christian society, where all the main-line churches have suffered serious losses.  In the Anglican Church of Canada we lost 53% of our membership from 1951 to 2001.  If Roman Catholic losses have been less severe, if Roman Catholics have been relatively more successful in passing on the faith to the next generation, I think tradition has something to do with it.  Tradition can be stifling, but it can also be life-giving. 

Bishop Spong admonishes us to change or die, and some changes are long over-due.  The Church of England is still debating women’s eligibility for the episcopate, when your church already has a woman as your Presiding Bishop. 
But change can also be disruptive and may actually hasten the demise of a religious culture.  We have paid a heavy price for discarding the two crowning achievements of the English Reformation: Cranmer’s Prayer Book and the King James Bible.

Please don’t get me wrong.  Most people in both our churches would say that whatever price we paid was well worth paying.  I am happy to be in a parish which still uses the old Prayer Book and the KJV, but we are in the minority, and, at the age of 80, I do not aspire to turn back the clock.   

For me the Anglican way, the middle path between Rome and Geneva, is still the only option.  Like the late Bishop Neill many years ago, I am happy to be in a church where I am never required to profess what I do not believe.

Christ Church, Cooperstown, New York
August 22, 2010

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