Word: churchful
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This all comes as a bit of surprise to the press, which - with ample encouragement from the Church's right - had been framing GAFcon as a decisive step toward schism in the Anglican Communion, the third biggest global religious fellowship. GAFcon seems to be falling apart on several fronts. First came the venue problems: the conference ping-ponged embarrassingly at the last minute from Jerusalem to Jordan and back to Jerusalem...
Then there was attendance. The clerics at GAFcon were really supposed to sit out the Communion's once-a-decade Lambeth Conference in July. But it turns out several key conservatives did not even show up at GAFcon (or simply made brief appearances) and will go on to the church-wide meeting in Canterbury in July. Meanwhile, conservative Southeast Asian bishops have fallen out with some GAFcon leaders. The conservative conference now seems reduced mostly to Africans and some first-world ideologues, not all of whom are as gung-ho as Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, the meeting's prime mover...
...opening statement by Akinola castigated "apostates" within the Communion and included the firebreathing line, "There is no more any hope, therefore, for a unified Communion." But he subsequently admitted in a speech, "We have no other place to go, nor is it our intention to start another church." Sydney Australia Archbishop Peter Jensen, a rising conservative, told reporters in Jerusalem yesterday that GAFcon "is a coalition of people who would not necessarily work together. Will it work? We don't know." Other speakers have been similarly vague...
...flared up during the 2004 race for the White House, when the Archbishop of St. Louis said he would deny the rite to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a pro-choice Catholic. Kerry is also divorced, but had his first marriage annulled, which allows Catholics to remarry in the Church. Last year, the Vatican reversed the annulment of Joseph P. Kennedy II's marriage to Sheila Rauch, who had written a book lambasting her ex-husband and the Catholic Church's practice of expunging marriages from their history. There have been no reports as to whether Kennedy, a former Congressman...
...Pope has expressed special concern for those devout Catholics who may face circumstances beyond their control: people who were married in the Church without being true believers, and only later marry a second time in full consciousness of their commitment to Catholicism; Catholics who wanted to stay in their original marriage, but were left by their spouse; victims of marital abuse. Many, however, are more like Giuliani and Berlusconi: ordinary sinners in search of a taste of salvation when Sunday rolls around...