Links Galore

CT Weblog has more links than you could ever want on reactions to last week's Episcopal convention

A reader, by the way, would like to know of any Lutheran blogs that are reporting on the ELCA convention this week in Milwaukee. I've not seen any word of any...post if you have information!

And while we're being all ecumenical, here's a piece from Canada's National Post commenting on the little-noticed news bit that Charles and Camilla are apparently cohabitating:

Trust the Brits to blithely accept news that the heir to the throne is living in what used to be called "sin" while getting all worked up in 2001 when Charles kissed Camilla on the cheek in public for the first time. Last week, Royal aides didn't even balk when confirming that Mrs. Parker Bowles and the Prince of Wales have connecting bedrooms.

The ironies, and hypocrisies, are so rich one does not know where to begin.

Here we have the future governor of the Church of England, as Charles would be when named king, living in a domestic relationship without paper or clergy with a woman with whom he committed adultery. And the reason for that arrangement, in part, is the Church's longtime position, reversed in 2001, that forbids divorced people with spouses who are still alive from marrying in the Church.

Yet this is the same Church founded by Henry the VIII in the 16th century as an offshoot of the Roman Catholic Church so that he could trade in Catherine of Aragon for Anne Boleyn. Unfortunately for Anne, the monarch later realized that beheading unwanted wives was much more convenient than divorce court. Henry would go through six marriages, two on the heels of divorces. Had he been alive today he could have avoided the muss by having the Catholic Church issue annulments so he could remarry, something it commonly does despite its avowed anti-divorce stance

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Well, let's first correct the inaccuracy. It was, indeed an annulment that Henry was seeking, not a "divorce." Catherine had been married to his brother, who died. When Catherine failed to produce a male heir and also started getting old, Henry went back to the beginnings of their marriage, which had only been possible because they had granted a dispensation from the Levitical prohibition against a brother marrying his brother's widow. Henry basically wanted an annulment on the grounds that the dispensation shouldn't have been granted in the first place.

(So you can actually see how the dispute had an ecclesiological dimension. Henry was asking the Vatican to declare it had decided wrongly before. Not going to happen.)