Hep Speak

Those of you who have read 1984 by George Orwell may well remember "New Speak." It fit well with "double think" and the rewriting of history by "minitrue" (short for "the Ministry of Truth"), based on the Oceania government's position that "he who controls the past controls the future." "Hep Speak" combines all of these ideas into one nice package. Defending his best efforts at tyranny and at being a school yard bully, Archbishop Hepworth continues to rave like a drunken man who cannot establish a reasonable premise for his own brand of logic. Every time I see a statement by John Hepworth I see glaring errors of fact, superficial theology at best, and all with the clear intention of destroying the Continuing Church, at least any part of it that he can.

David Virtue, no doubt allowing the Ordinariate club to have just enough rope that they make their true colors visible, has created an "ordinariate" section on VirtueOnline. There, we see a statement by the Australian Primate, a statement in keeping with all that the word "primate" suggests.

Let's look at a few examples of Hep Speak. "It was agreed that those involved could stay in their own parishes, but under the episcopal jurisdiction of a bishop entering the Ordinariate." Right. So, now Hepworth proposes that local rectors and diocesan bishops should have to put up with members of respective parishes rebelling against the established church authority at home, answering instead to a foreign bishop in a foreign jurisdiction. They may thumb their noses at rectors and bishops, and create disorder in their own churches, all by pretending to have some legitimacy from some outside authority. Individuals in a parish have been given permission to create confusion and to be destructive. They may thus let all things be done indecently and out of order. In the same statement Hepworth has the temerity to say, "Christian Unity is not an option for the Church." Apparently, and ironically, he is saying that he has removed the "option" of allowing a parish to experience its own unity on a local level by asserting himself, in bully fashion. What "unity" is he for, considering that he has attempted in this same document to tear up and divide local parishes? And, what does he mean by unity? He means that a small number of former Anglicans convert to Roman Catholicism. In no way can that movement, from one denomination to another, unify the Church. And, what good is political unity anyway without charity? What kind of unity is it when it is simply forced on people by some legal status? "The tragedy of Continuing Anglicanism - and indeed of the Anglican Communion - is the absence of Eucharistic Communion with anyone but itself." What is that man smoking? That has never been true of the Anglican Communion, and neither is it true of Continuing Anglicanism. We have never forbidden non-Anglicans to receive the sacrament in our churches. But, it is most certainly true that both of the Two One True Churches forbid the sacrament to anyone but their own.

It is tragic that so many people who fled for refuge to a church body, in which they sought refuge according to the Affirmation of St. Louis, have found themselves bullied, lied to, and pressured to destroy their identity by assimilation. Hepworth continues to use his disguise as an Anglican Archbishop, a pretense if ever there was one, to heap insult upon insult to our carefully considered and most deeply held convictions. He continues to invoke the word "unity" in the most deceptive manner, meaning only that people should betray their own consciences and ignore their beliefs so that they may join another denomination. At the end of the day, when all of the people who plan to swim the Tiber have jumped in, the Church will not be any more unified than it was before. After all, individuals have always gone from one to the other, and that will not cease to be the case. The good news is, Hep Speak is failing, and his voice gets weaker every day, someday to be forgotten as we have forgotten the words of Alexander the Coppersmith. Soon, this latest threat to our mission as Continuing Anglicans will have passed, and we can concentrate on real unity among ourselves. Then we can get on with our mission, and allow no more idiotic distractions. That is, once we can actually say with St. Paul, "Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices." II Cor. 2:11