AN MCJ EXCLUSIVE: THE 2009 EPISCOPAL CHURCH EMERGENCY BISHOPS MEETING

Friday, November 6th, 2009 | Uncategorized

The assembled bishops all stood as Katharine Jefferts Schori walked into the room past a bowing Beers and stood behind the podium.  “Beers!” shouted Schori.  “Fetch me a cognac!  A good one!  Chop, chop!” 

Beers hurried over to the room’s bar, returned with a Hennessy XO in a snifter and handed it to the Presiding Bishop.  “Now get lost!” barked Schori as Beers hurried out of the room.

“You may be seated.  I suppose you all know why we’re here,” said Schori, swirling her drink.  “Yes, what is it, Geralyn?”

Rhode Island’s Geralyn Wolf stood up and said, “Um, Bishop Katharine, before we begin, a few of us had some, um, concerns about the location selected for this meeting.”

“Concerns?  What’s there to be concerned about?  Have you been to the spa in this place?  The masseuse there, Henri, is…well, let’s just say that…I…um…where was I?  And the meals here are fantastic.”

“I know all that, Bishop Katharine.  It’s just that a lot of us have serious budget troubles right now and thought that some people might think that it was…you know…inappropriate to stay in a five-star hotel on the French Riviera.”

“Geralyn.  The Episcopal Church has a European presence as well.  Isn’t that right, Pete?”

“That’s right, Bishop Katherine,” answered Pierre Whalon, Bishop of the Convocation of the American Churches in Europe.  “And we’re all delighted that you’re here.”

“Damn right you are, Pete, sit down and be quiet.  So you see, Geralyn,” continued the Presiding Bishop, taking a sip of her cognac, “we have to honor that presence.  By the way, all your diocesan assessments will be going up next year.  Let’s get down to business.  John?”

Washington DC’s John Chane stood up.  “Thank you, Bishop Katharine,” he said.  “As you all know, this emergency meeting was called to come up with a strategy to deal with that recent Vatican initiative for Anglican bigots.”

A group of Communion Partner bishops stood up and glared at Bishop Chane.  Central Florida’s John Howe shouted,”I’ll have you know that we resent that!”

“Yeah, well, bite me, Klansman,” Chane sneeringly replied.  “Shut up or I’ll kick your ass halfway into next year.”

“You and what 25 other guys, Nancy boy?” Howe shot back as Gene Robinson started to cry for some reason.

Chane, now enraged, snarled, “That’s it, you’re going down, Howe!” and started for the Central Florida bishop.

“Bring it on, princess!” Howe exclaimed as the whole room began yelling.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!!” Bishop Schori called out over the din.  “We can argue semantics later.  Please return to your seats and let’s get on with the business of this meeting.”

Chane pointed at Howe, mouthed something and sat down.  Howe flipped off Chane and returned to his seat, exchanging a high five with West Texas Bishop Gary Lillibridge.

“Now then,” Schori continued.  “We have this Vatican initiative in place.  The question is what we do about it.” 

“Nothing!  Nothing’s going to come of that thing!” shouted Massachusetts’ Tom Shaw.

“I know that, Tom,” Utah’s Carolyn Tanner Irish said.  “It’s just that I’m getting tired of all the phone calls from the media.  Bishop Katharine and I thought that we needed to be more proactive about this matter.”

“Actually, Carolyn, I thought that,” said the Presiding Bishop, staring into her snifter.  “You just robotically agreed with me as you always do. Have any of you people come up with anything?”  Missouri’s George Wayne Smith stood up.  “Yes, George?”

“Bishop Katherine, some of us…” said Smith.

“There’s two A’s and one E in there, George.”

“I’m terribly sorry, Bishop Katharine.  Anyway, several of us formed a sort of informal committee, meeting mostly online, phone chats now and then, that sort of thing…”

“Get to the point, George”

“Sorry.  Anyway, we thought we could establish some kind of phone bank.  To call Catholics or even conservative Anglicans, I guess, all over the country.”

“I get it.  To get our message to people directly instead of allowing the media and all those boogers to mischaracterize our…”

“Um…do you, by any chance, mean bloggers, Bishop Katharine?” asked Maine’s Stephen Lane.

“Don’t ever correct me, Lane.  Anyway, is that what you had in mind, George?”

Smith looked puzzled.  “Well…I guess we could do that.”

Schori shut her eyes and ennuciated every word.  “What did you have in mind, George?”

The Bishop of Missouri consulted his notes.  “Well, Bishop Hollingsworth of Ohio thought it would really funny to call Catholic families and ask, ‘Is your refrigerator running.’  Then when they say yes, tell them, ‘You better catch it or it’ll get away.’ and hang up.”

“Oh for the love of…”

“Kirk Smith told us that he used to call bowling alleys, ask if they had 15-pound balls and if they did, he’d ask them, ‘How the hell do you walk, man?’ and slam down the phone.”

“George?”

“I guess we could call bowling alleys owned by Catholics or conservative Anglicans or something although I don’t know how you track something like that down.”

“George?!”

“Bishop Caldwell, out there in Wyoming, likes the idea of calling during their coffee hours and asking to speak to people like Amanda Hugginkiss, Seymour Butz or Hugh Jass but I don’t know if…”

“GEORGE!!”

“Yes, Bishop Katherine?”

“Shut the EFFING hell up, you moron!  We’re a Christian church, not an elementary school!  And what did I tell you about the 2 A’s and one E?!  Has anybody got ideas that aren’t bone-crushingly stupid?!”

“I do,” Chicago’s Jeff Lee said smugly.  “Change your job title.”

“To what?”

“Pope.”

The assembled bishops let out a collective gasp.  Bishop Schori looked nonplussed.  “What possible good would that do?” she asked.

“Stay with me here.  What do all those bigots…”

“Knock it off, Lee, you little punk,” shouted John Howe.

“Fine, whatever.  What do all those conservatives worship more than anything in the world?  Tradition.  The 1928 prayer book, outdated crap like sin and atonement, that sort of stuff.

“They like old crap?  We’ll give ‘em more old crap than they can handle.  From now on, Bishop Katharine is Pope Katharine I and she has the job until she dies.

“We buy her a gestatorial chair. All her correspondence will have a wax impression of her Great Seal connected. We buy her her own papal tiara and she wears it all the time.

“We publish that Latin version of our prayer book and regularly have services from it. Papists love that crap. Then we can start going on about how lax the Roman Catholic Church has become.

“We remodel St. John the Divine or the NatCat until they make St. Peter’s look like a country Baptist church. You never know. We may end up pulling more people from them than they get from us.”

The room fell completely silent for a long time. Finally, Schori murmured, “I like it. It’s got possibilities. Definite possibilities.

Schori downed the rest of her cognac in one gulp and said, “Since I assume that none of the rest of you morons have any ideas that aren’t idiotic, let’s hit the beach. We’ll get to work on this when we get back home. Meeting adjourned.”

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