[HoB/D] Ironies revealed at the coffee hour

[Louie Crew <lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu>]

A priest from Barbados visited my parish yesterday and told me at the
coffee hour that when Lambeth 1958 urged unlimited use of
contraception for family planning, many clergy were quite up in arms
in the diocese, which held, as did the 1920 Lambeth conference, that
birth control was a sin and that married people had a Christian
obligation to propagate the earth.  The Bishop of Barbados calmed them
by stressing that resolutions of the Lambeth conference were mere
recommendations and not binding.  He signed his letter with the
flourish of first name and See, a convention still used in much of the
Communion:  "Gay -- Barbados."

Another guest was a priest from the U.S. who told me of staying at
Lambeth Palace in the 1960s when it operated something like an
Anglican bed and breakfast.  At breakfast his first morning there, he
was asked whether he knew another U.S. priest, whom they named.
"Yes," he replied, "We were in seminary together."  "Well, he cut out
of here yesterday without paying his bill,"  they told him.  The
priest who left without paying, the guest told me, is now one of the
bishop schismatics petitioning Lambeth Palace for support. "What would
the b&b bill be now with interest compounded annually?" the guest
mused.

I find it consoling to imagine tidbits from our era dropped into
conversation of the coffee hour 50 years hence.  There will be new
struggles then, not the same ones which beset us.  Hallelujah!

Louie
Newark deputation

Louie Crew, 377 S. Harrison St., 12d, East Orange, NJ 07018.
973-395-1068
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew