A new bill of rights?

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 27

NEWSPAPERS are carrying lead stories on the inchoate schism between the Episcopalians and the rest of the Anglican Communion. The news tick is that the Anglicans (headed by the archbishop of Canterbury) have informed the Episcopal Church in the United States that it has to stop allowing certain practices by next September or else disaffiliate.

That can be made to sound like a threat from one branch of the YMCA to another branch, to stop scoring field goals the way they've been doing, or play with another league.

The tendency is to depreciate arguments, even battles, in which we are not directly concerned. But it is important, also, to examine the perspectives of those who quarrel. There was a lot of this quarreling among Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists 150 years ago over the issue of slavery. And having decided to free blacks, the next thing you knew, the churches proceeded to free women. There goes the neighborhood?

Well, yes, in a way. But the installation in New Hampshire of a homosexual bishop who advocates the ordination of homosexual men and women as clergy is taken by the men in charge of the Anglican Communion as different from the kind of egalitarianism that abolished slavery and extended civil rights to women. These, we all tend to agree, were simply belated acknowledgments of basic Christian penetrations into the nature of the community of God. Yet the theologians who hold the line on the matter of homosexuality may feel a social battering on the order of what Southern theologians in the 19th century were subjected to when they defended slavery.

The capacity of this breach to divide is real and is tenacious. The adamance of it is caught in the fact that the Church of Uganda cut relations with the diocese of New Hampshire following the consecration of the gay ...