c. 2007 Religion News Service
S.C. Bishop Elected Again After First Ballot Thrown Out
(RNS) The Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina has again elected the Rev. Mark Lawrence as its bishop, less than five months after Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori nullified his previous election.
Lawrence, 56, was re-elected at a special convention on St. James Island, S.C., and was the only candidate on the Aug. 4 ballot. Rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Bakersfield, Calif., Lawrence is a member of conservative diocese of San Joaquin.
Lawrence was first elected bishop by South Carolina last September. But Jefferts Schori nullified that election in March, ruling that Lawrence had not received the required “consents,” or approval, from a majority of the Episcopal Church’s 110 dioceses.
Several Episcopal dioceses argued publicly against Lawrence’s election. In interviews with church personnel he refused to state clearly that he would not allow conservative South Carolina to secede from the majority liberal Episcopal Church, they said.
Lawrence will again need to gain a second round of consents from Episcopal dioceses.
_ Daniel Burke
Franciscans Expand to Ireland
LONDON (RNS) One of the youngest branches of the widespread Franciscan family has just opened its first house in Ireland, in Limerick.
The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal was founded in the Bronx in 1987 by eight Capuchin friars. A primary aim is working to provide material help for the poor and strictly adhering to Catholic teaching.
The order now counts just more than 100 members, with five friaries in New York, New Jersey, Texas and New Mexico. The order also has a friary in Honduras; its first European house was opened in London in 2000, followed by a second in Yorkshire, in 2005.
The friars say the popularity of their order stems from its adherence to religious tradition. The Franciscans of the Renewal, which split from a Capuchin order in 1987, was founded on the belief that other orders had lost their way following liberal church reforms of the 1960s.
In a 2005 book about the order, “A Drama of Reform,” its chief founder, the Rev. Benedict Groeschel, complained most Catholic orders in the English-speaking world were “lost in the woods” and that some are even “filled with dissent from official Church teaching … .”
The new friary in Limerick is headed by Brother Shawn O’Connor, who was born in New York and has been working at the London friary. His fellow friars include two other Americans (from Nebraska and Philadelphia), as well as a German and a Frenchman.
Bishop Donal Murray of Limerick prayed that “like St Francis himself, they may play a fruitful part in the rebuilding of the Lord’s church in our diocese.”
_ Robert Nowell and Jeff Diamant
Quote of the Day: Religion Writer and Author Mark Pinsky
(RNS) “The emerging face and voice of American evangelicalism is that of a pragmatic, politically sophisticated, pastor of a middle-class megachurch.”
_ Mark Pinsky, religion writer for the Orlando Sentinel and author of “A Jew Among the Evangelicals: A Guide for the Perplexed,” writing in an op-ed column for USA Today.
KRE DS END RNS
