Another ISM Controversy

So, once again, here is the photo to update evidence to the claim that Tia L. Douglass is a bishop.

If I drew this as a cartoon, no one would believe it. I must say, I like the blue and purple.

Meanwhile there is controversy in Swindon, as someone is putting it about to funeral directors that there is something not quite valid about Mark Paris's claim to ministry. This is not an uncommon occurence, and has even happened with Unitarian ministers. Years back Jonathan Blake in court demonstrated that the orders received by bishops as such in the Liberal Catholic Apostolic Church are entirely valid even if Roman Catholicism also regards them as irregular. At their simplest, they are part of Old Catholicism, and priests so ordained come within those orders.

The other issue is the bad history between the Church of England and Old and Liberal Catholicism. It is as bad as the historical animosity between the Baptist Union and Unitarianism. In the Unitarian case, General Baptists kept defecting into Unitarianism, and the Particular Baptists were at the forefront of trying to sideline the Unitarians from non-conformist bodies. In the Old Catholic case, there was Arnold Harris Mathew, who went around re-ordaining Anglo-Catholics unsure about their ontological basis of their ministry, and Archbishop Davidson regarded AHM as a pest. AHM was neither reconciled with Roman Catholicism nor fully with Anglicanism, although he did end up within local Anglicanism as in the Church of England.

The Church of England is becoming ethically distant from this country, and in the gap comes these many Liberal Catholics. No doubt Mark Paris can reach the diversity of the UK population in his area unlike the Church of England, and the best thing the Church of England can do is keep out of the way. It has its own congregations to serve, other sympathisers and anyone else too lazy to find a more compatible church. There is no monopoly of rites of passage or worship by any Church, and the fact that we have an established Church is an anachronism that needs attention.