Some in Pittsburgh expected to resist split from Episcopal Church

Amid reaction to the removal of Episcopal Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh from ministry, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church praised plans by some local Episcopalians to remain with the Episcopal Church even if the majority of the diocese votes to secede and join an Anglican province in South America.

"Our understanding is that the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh will not go away, even if the convention takes a canonically inappropriate vote to secede," Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said in a teleconference yesterday.

The diocesan vote is scheduled for Oct. 4. When the U.S. bishops voted 88-35 Thursday to authorize Bishop Jefferts Schori to depose Bishop Duncan, the more theologically conservative Argentina-based Province of the Southern Cone made him a bishop-at-large. If the Pittsburgh diocese votes to secede into the Southern Cone, the secessionists are expected to re-elect him as their bishop.

Local Episcopalians who want to remain in the U.S. Church have said that one member of the diocesan Standing Committee -- which governs in the absence of a bishop -- is opposed to secession and will immediately begin to reconstitute a reorganized Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh that would choose its own leadership.

The 2.2 million-member Episcopal Church is the U.S. province of the 77 million-member Anglican Communion. Bishop Duncan and others believe that the U.S. church no longer firmly upholds classic Christian doctrines on the mission and identity of Jesus, the authority of the Bible and sexual ethics.

 

Some expected to resist split from Episcopal Church
Pittsburgh Post Gazette, PA