If they are stealing Oscar Romero why not Mother Theresa?

Hey, LaVallette, let them “steal” – they’ll NEVER truly have any of them!! [Whether the saints and those of us who really believe are Easterners, Romanists or whatever else (of course as Christians, regardless!!), TEO lost any and all "rights" to the good people decades ago!!!!]

The only one they really are entitled to – and they can have her, “good riddance!!” I say – is Vita Dutton Scudder and anyone else who’s of her ilk (not knowing the other two women on that “list” forbids me to comment about them…)! Again I say, Good riddance and Godspeed!!! MARCHE!!!!

We real Christians (regardless of denomination) get to keep the good ones – and the real Protestants (Luther, Chauvin, Schwarzert {Melanchthon}, Neander et al) will almost certainly agree now that their blinders will have been removed post-death…

Next GC, Margaret Sanger and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, famous eugenesists who want to prevent an increase in the population of undesireables.

This is an example of what’s wrong with the General Convention model for running a church. There are so many resolutions that this one, containing non-Christian “saints,” slid by without debate. This is just no way to run a church. The people complaining about the constitution of the ACNA should take a look at what’s going on in Anaheim before asking that we return to such a travesty.

Knowing the politics of The Episcopal Organization, is this supposed to be a surprise?

As with everything else, TEC has turned the idea of “sainthood” into one about politics, “justice,” and power.

The new TEC “saints” have about as much in common to the traditional Saints as this post does to a Nobel Prize winning piece of Literature.

I wish ECUSA would stop trying to scam credibility from *other people’s saints*. St Tikhon was the patriarch of Moscow & all Russia, murdered by the Bolsheviks in the mid-20′s. He had been a friend of Bishop Grafton of Fond Du Loc when he was a bishop in the US earlier in his career. The faith of Grafton & St. Tikhon bears zero resemblance to what ECUSA believes and stands for in 2009. To shoehorn St. Tikhon, a martyr of the Orthodox Church, into their calendar is just obscene. Notably, the successor of St. Tikhon, Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America has decided to have ecumenical discussions with ACNA and abandon them with ECUSA. Met. Jonah is also a convert from ECUSA to Orthodoxy.
ECUSA needs to lay off window dressing using actual believers when they don’t believe what the believers believed! They like to dress the parts and not act them.

Oh, BTW is Old “Six Wives” Harry an Anglican saint yet? If not why not? I than Chas 1 is tho.

I know about Oscar Romero and the other Catholic martyrs of El Salvador… who are the Episcopal martyrs of El Salvador?

The whole practice of proclaiming people who were not a part of your church at all to be ‘saints’ is kind of creepy. It’s like the Mormon practice of posthumous baptism into the LDS church. Even if someone opposed the church in this lifetime they will ‘claim’ them in the next.

That should be “I think Chas 1 is tho”.

As an Orthodox Christian, it appalls me that TEO would dare claim the great martyr and saint, Tikhon, as a TEO “saint.” If Tikhon saw the present state of TEO, his first response would be an instant anathema upon them, just like the one he issued against the Bolsheviks. VGR offering a molyben to Tikhon! Dreadful image! Of course, perhaps this is just a cheap “gimmick” to lure Metropolitan Jonah back in their direction from ACNA. “See, Jonah, we are almost Orthodox, too.” It all has a bad smell to it.

Don, indeed both HOD and HOB (including the formerly vaunted “Windsor Bishops”) reek. Badly. Yecccchhhhh!

Perhaps the folks at this Convention, being amid all the hoopla of Hollywood and southern California, made a mistake in their rush to get this “sainthood” thing up for a vote and inadvertently wrote “Oscar” Romero when they actually meant “Caesar.” It would be fitting for the TEOers to want to have the first “saints calendar” featuring a former guest star on “I Love Lucy.”

“James Theodore Holly” – AKA “Buddy”? Patron saint of Rock & Roll?

No, no, Little Myrmidon. I think, from the discussion at SF some months ago, this Holly was a black Episcopal priest who went to serve in Haiti.

My favorite quote from the late Bp. Oscar Romero: “A church that suffers no persecution but enjoys the privileges and support of the things of the earth – beware! – is not the true church of Jesus Christ. A preaching that does not point out sin is not the preaching of the gospel. A preaching that makes sinners feel good, so that they are secured in their sinful state, betrays the gospel’s call.”

There is a real risk here in claiming true martyrs this way. Some will read what they taught, and think upon it.

That should be “I think Chas 1 is tho”.

LaVallette, thanks for clarifying. I thought you were invoking a LOLCAT.

I Chas Chheezburger!!

One former priest, an Anglo-Catholic, prayed that we would recognize the life and witness of the saint and “follow their good example”. He explained once that all of the saints, being human, have examples we do not want to follow. For instance, St. Augustine was not a model of kindness, St. Athanasius was subject to occasional wrath, etc.

What is not clear to me is that all of the above proposed people are actually Christians who are at least in part good models of Christian behaviour that we should emulate.

Off topic, but a news story you might have fun with. Have you seen the reports of dead squid washing up on So-Cal beaches after Saturday’s 4.0 earthquake off the coast from La Jolla?

The more I think about this the more this bugs me. Don’t the Episcopal church have their own martyrs? Why are they co opting Orthodox and Catholic martyrs and claiming them as their own Saints?

When the Jesuits were murdered in El Salvador I was a student at a Jesuit school. It was a blow to all the Jesuit teachers we had, and in all my classes with priests there was a day of teaching about the importance of serving the poor and the willingness to lay down your life for the faith and for your fellow man. I somehow doubt that these men would have laid down their lives for the Episcopal church of which they were not members.

When I read about the political infighting of the Episcopal church it’s fascinating from a distance. However, when they pull this kind of move and try to ‘claim’ Catholics as their own it gets personal.

Also – what is the deal where they can evidently just randomly name somebody an Episcopal saint? Maybe I am just used to the laborious Catholic system… but doesn’t this seem kind of random that is was just a quick vote and suddenly they are Episcopal saints?

I guess I don’t mind them honoring Catholic saints, because since we SHOULD be one church, they SHOULD be able to share saints. We see more than one Prot theologian who references St Augustine, and more than one Prot who honors the memory of Teresa of Calcutta.

What bugs the hell out of me is when they ADD to the number. Heaven forfend anybody should get the idea that Vita is an actual saint defined as such by the RCC, or even considered an actual hero alongside Romero.

I agree with Therese on Catholic saints. We should all of us as Christians want to follow the examples of Christians who have gone before us. As Ed the Roman says, maybe some of it will rub off.

But the Lesser Feasts and Fasts was getting to be a little bit of a smorgasbord even before this iteration. With this Holy Women, Holy Men revision it’s gone beyond useful. I’ll stick with the Prayer Book Holy Days, thanks.

I don’t know enough about Oscar Romero. I mean how saintly was he? I joined the Episcopal Church in the summer before my junior year of high school, and in my new enthusiasm for church, thought I might want to be a priest. I became friends with a Catholic schoolmate who also wanted to be a priest. He turned Episcopalian after he got a girlfriend in college. And he was always liberal while I was and am pretty far to the right. Anyways, Oscar Romero is one of his heroes because I think my friend’s conception of church is chiefly to promote “social justice.” Wasn’t Romero one of those proponents of liberation theology? My friend digs that stuff. Twelve years after we met in high school, he’s a seminarian at VTS while I’m a cynic about church. I’m not sure whether to look at ACNA or swim the Tiber or the Bosphorous.

Jon says “I became friends with a Catholic schoolmate who also wanted to be a priest. He turned Episcopalian after he got a girlfriend in college.”

Another “pelvic thrust”!! Another Cutie has come to deliver judgement!.

Oh sure. Now you tell me. After I spent the day humming Peggy Sue.

LaVallete, it’s worse than that. His girlfriend also wanted to be a priest and is in seminary now too. Their relationship became sexual even though she claimed to be a “conservative.” From what I’ve heard she became a sex addict, though I don’t think either the diocese or VTS is aware of it. And my friend was single for three years before he started dating an 18 year old. When he started seminary he and his new girlfriend who’s attending some college in southern Maryland moved in together. They live off campus. He married her last year because surprisingly VTS didn’t think it appropriate (but don’t they allow gay couples to live together on campus?). Now here’s a guy who wants to be a priest but did he get married in church? No, he and his wife got married at the Poe museum in Richmond, VA.

Good Lord, Jon, the Poe museum? Not a good omen. Check out ACNA, but whatever you do, not TEC where people like this will be priests.