THE "CATHOLIC CHURCH" ACCORDING TO CHARLES BENNISON

News Analysis

By David W. Virtue

The Bishop of Pennsylvania, Charles E. Bennison says that Catholicity
is like a basket full of every kind of fruit there is, while Orthodoxy
is like a jar of all-fruit jelly.

Writing in the May issue of The Pennsylvania Episcopalian, the
revisionist bishop who faces multiple lawsuits from orthodox rectors
who simply want to live out the orthodox and catholic faith, says that
Rome does not need to be the center of the catholic church at all, but
recent events lead him to believe as never before that the church must
be catholic.
Orthodoxy, he said, represents a theological compromise or reduction
made to include diversity.

The bishop blasted orthodox bishops willing to cross diocesan
boundaries saying they "willfully violated the centuries-old consensus
in place since the Council of Nicea that no bishop will enter the
geographic bounds of another bishop's diocese without his or her
permission."

"Those violating the agreement today argue that the Episcopal Church
has become apostate by its 2003 decision about the place of gay men
and lesbians in our church. In our eyes these "invading" bishops are
schismatic, violating the very church order that provides the
framework for working through controversy. They are out, in effect, to
form a new church."

Bennison then wrote that parting ways over a transitory issue is a
"protestant" thing to do, manifesting lack of faith in the "one, holy
catholic and apostolic church".

"The schismatic behavior of some of my episcopal colleagues gives me a
sympathetic understanding of what the bishops of the Western Church
must have felt when the Church of England broke with Rome. It is hard
to do such a thing and claim to be the catholic church."

Bennison said the primates of the Anglican Communion compromise the
catholicity of the church by inviting the Episcopal Church USA "to
effect a moratorium on the election and consent to the consecration of
any candidate to the episcopate who is living in the same gender union
until some new consensus in the Anglican Communion emerges"

Bennison said ECUSA's decision in 2003 arose out of our sense of
obedience to the will of God expressed through the work of the Spirit
of truth within our own communion. "It is a particular gift of our
church to the wider communion as it seeks a new consensus."

He said the Episcopal Church has come to recognize that (1) some human
beings are by nature homosexual, and (2) all persons who are called by
God to enter into lifelong monogamous unions, including homosexual
persons, should be permitted to and supported in doing so.

Bennison concluded by saying that this is exactly what the catholic
church does. "It does not put a moratorium on the Spirit. It tests it."

NOW it is hard to imagine a bishop coming up with so much convoluted
logic and nonsense as this "bishop's message" to the diocese.

In that the Episcopal Church is full of "fruits" might be the only
truthful thing he said. He might have added "nuts" as well, but he can
hardly be blamed for overlooking the obvious. What other church can
lay claim to having its own unofficial "Quean Lutibelle" as the
secular and lay leader of episcopal pansexuality!

Bennison the Bizarre has his own list of theological irregularities.
T'was he who wrote a Visigoth Rite to be used for persons of the same
sex who wanted to tie the nuptial knot in Philadelphia's cathedral.
T'was he who could not affirm basic doctrines of the Christian Faith
when challenged to do so by Fr. David Moyer, Anglo-Catholic rector of
the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont. And it was he who said
Jesus was a sinner (not sinless) who forgave himself - becoming the
first bishop in the 2,000-year history of the church to make such a
statement. (Not even Arius said such a thing.) It was Bennison who
said the church wrote the bible and can therefore rewrite it and it
was he who said that Jesus is "a Christ" but not the Christ?

The incredible thing is that Bennison still manages to keep his job,
and this is so because the Standing Committee is largely made up of
priests, many of whom are dependent on him for money to keep their
parishes open even though some of them have double digit
congregations. Other non-clergy members of the Standing Committee
wouldn't know Jesus if he turned water into Chateau neuf de pape at a
straight wedding, thinking perhaps that the act was being performed by
a later day Houdini snuck in for the occasion to entertain them.

Bennison's claims to theological idiocy come naturally. He was
rejected for postulancy by his father's examining chaplains when he
sought to go to seminary because he barely knew the books of the bible
and only got in because his mother insisted and his father, also a
revisionist bishop, got bullied by his wife. That should have tipped
the hands of the search committee looking for a new PA bishop, but
Bennison had long since replaced sound doctrine for smiles and charm,
and he easily wooed the fools "examining" him. He also came from
Episcopal Divinity School whose president at the time, the former Utah
bishop Otis Charles later dumped his wife and five kids to "marry" a
four times married man, thus leading credence to the truth that the
Episcopal Church had finally elevated Sodomy above the Trinity as the
primary source of ecclesiastical devotion and worship.

But it is Bennison's charge that crossing boundaries was rejected by
the Church Fathers that is itself faulty historically. Historian
professor William Tighe in an article "Abusing the Fathers: The
Windsor Report's Misleading Appeal to Nicea" writes, "It is hard to
see how this canon has anything to do with the troubles of
contemporary Anglicanism that evoked the Windsor Report. The canon
does uphold the unity of the local church, but the situation it
addresses is the reunion of a schismatic group with the Church, not
the appropriate response of bishops to the defection of one of their
brethren from their common orthodoxy. However, the latter type of
situation did arise in the fourth century, in the long aftermath of
the Council of Nicea, and later still."

Wrote Tighe: "The main purpose of the Council of Nicea was to judge
the views of the Alexandrian priest and theologian Arius, who held
that Jesus was a creature-a divine being created by God before the
angels, the cosmos, and mankind, but a creature nevertheless. Nicea
condemned Arius's views, and its creed confessed the full co-divinity
and co-eternity of "the everlasting Son of the Father."

"As time went on, the whole Church became divided over the question,
with bishop opposing bishop. Athanasius was willing, as the conflict
intensified-in his case, as early as the mid-340s-to INTERVENE
UNILATERALLY IN DIOCESES WHOSE BISHOPS WERE ARIANS OR COMPROMISERS.
The historians Socrates and Sozomen, writing in the middle of the next
century, record that he ordained men in dioceses whose bishops were
tainted with Arianism to serve the orthodox upholders of Nicea, and
that he did so without seeking or obtaining the permission of those
bishops."

So there you have it.

Bennison's views that homosexuality is hard wired or "naturally born"
is a myth that has long been exploded. Dr. Jeffrey Satinover the world
authority on homosexuality says that the idea of "sexual orientation"
is a fiction and that the scientific evidence from a University of
Chicago study of sexuality in America sampled over 100,000 individuals
found that in the majority of both men and women, "homosexuality," as
defined by any scientifically rigorous criteria, spontaneously tends
to "mutate" into heterosexuality over the course of a lifetime. "The
proportion of people who adopt a homosexual identity and the length of
time they persist in holding on to it are affected primarily by
environmental factors clearly identifiable in these epidemiologic
studies. These factors-deemed "cultural" or "demographic"-include
effects such as social networks, education, early sexual experiences,
childhood sexual abuse, and cultural beliefs," he says.

Bennison's views on homosexuality are as simplistic as his views on
theology and doctrine are heretical. His understanding of catholicity
and orthodoxy are also wide of the mark. Catholicity as a "basket full
of every kind of fruit" is offensive to Roman Catholics who see their
"basket" as containing most if not all of the true fruit, while
Protestantism broke with Rome over a very fundamental "fruit"
concerning justification by faith. A Reformed evangelical church
holding on to the five battle cries of reformation: sola scriptura,
sola fidei, sola Cristus, sola gratia and solideo Gloria will have a
quite different basket of "fruit".

In truth, Bennison doesn't get it. He is so far out in left field,
along with Jack Spong whom he recently invited into the diocese, shows
where his heart and soul is - and it is not with the faith once
delivered.

He is also watching as his diocese goes into free fall with dying
parishes and money drying up with only four percent of pledges to the
total operating budget having been received so far this year.

If Bennison is looking for 'tests of the Spirit' he is not finding
them in this diocese whose small band of orthodox priests are under
siege and his liberal clergy have no ability to make churches grow.

The truth is it is Bennison who is quenching the Spirit in his own
diocese, and he is watching as his orthodox clergy grow more
disillusioned and demoralized with each passing day. In time they will
all go, they have no future here, and as we are seeing in so many
other revisionist dioceses, the orthodox and catholic remnant know it
is only a matter of time and the axe will fall on them, just ask the
remnant in Connecticut, Los Angeles, Central PA, Kentucky to name but
a few dioceses.

The countdown for the Episcopal Church's faithful has begun; it is now
only a matter of time.