Special Report
By David W. Virtue
Virtue Online
October 31, 2007
http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=6990
The Bishop of Pennsylvania, Charles E. Bennison has been inhibited from ordained ministry and must cease all episcopal functions as bishop after November 3 diocesan convention. The Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori inhibited Bennison Oct. 31 from all ordained ministry pending a judgment of the Court for the Trial of a Bishop. The Title IV Review Committee had earlier issued a presentment for conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy against Bennison on October 28.
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It was found that there was enough evidence to send Bennison to trial on two counts of the presentment centering on accusations that when he was rector of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Upland, California, he did not respond properly after learning sometime in 1973 that his brother, John, who worked as a lay youth minister in the parish, was having an affair with a 14-year-old member of the youth group. John Bennison was also married at the time, according to the presentment.
The bishop is accused of not taking any steps to end the affair, not providing proper pastoral care to the girl, not investigating whether she needed medical care, taking three years to notify the girl's parents, not reporting his brother to anyone, not investigating whether his brother was sexually involved with any other parishioners or other children, and seeking no advice on how to proceed. The presentment says Charles Bennison reacted "passively and self-protectively."
A second Presentment account accuses Bennison of continuing to fail in his duties until the fall of 2006. John Bennison became ordained during this time and the bishop is accused of not preventing his brother's ordination, or his ultimately successful application to be reinstated as a priest after having renounced his orders in 1977, or his desire to transfer from the Diocese of Los Angeles to the Diocese of California. John Bennison was forced in 2006 to renounce his orders again when news of his abuse became public.
The Standing Committee of the diocese met in special meeting October 30 at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Wayne, Pennsylvania, and consented to the inhibition, as is required by the Title IV, Canon 3, Section 45 of the Episcopal Church.
Bennison must cease "all episcopal, ministerial, and canonical acts" effective at 12:01 a.m. November 4, according to the inhibition Jefferts Schori sent to Bennison. The diocese is set to hold its 224th annual diocesan convention November 3. At that time, the Standing Committee will become the ecclesiastical authority in the diocese. Bennison will continue to be paid during the time that he is inhibited. He will have an opportunity to respond to the presentment's charges. A date for the trial will be set.
The exodus of Bennison from both the Diocese of Pennsylvania and the ordained ministry ends a decade of gross incompetence, ineptitude, clergy mistrust, alleged fiscal incompetence, sexual cover-up, and theological obfuscation which eroded his base among his liberal backers even as Bennison inhibited and deposed a dwindling handful of orthodox clergy in the diocese.
Events grew so bad between himself and the Standing Committee that they repeatedly asked him to resign. Bennison equally and steadfastly refused to go. The frustration of his clergy reached fever pitch at last year's diocesan convention that repeated calls for his resignation and allegations of his brother's sexual dominated the convention.
In many circles, Bishop Bennison's pronouncements made him the brunt of laughter, disappointment, or anger. Bishop Bennison became the village idiot of ecclesiastical pronouncements, his list of theological heresies and apostasies guaranteeing him a place forever in Dante's Inferno, or as a cathedral gargoyle overlooking Philadelphia's Schuylkill River.
He wrote a Visigoth Rite for two (or more) persons of the same sex who wanted to tie the nuptial knot in Philadelphia's cathedral. He also could not affirm basic doctrines of the Christian Faith when challenged to do so by Fr. David Moyer, Anglo-Catholic rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont.
Bennison said Jesus was a sinner (not sinless) who forgave himself - becoming the first bishop in the 2,000-year history of the church to make such a statement. (Not even Arius said such a thing.) It was Bennison who said the church wrote the bible and can therefore rewrite it, and it was he who said that Jesus is "a Christ" but not the Christ; with his latest inanity that Jesus "winked at sin," uttered two months ago. In the Pennsylvania Episcopalian (February 2006), Bennison doubts the "historical accuracy" of the four gospels and compares Mark, Matthew, Luke and John to the words on the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin calling both "propaganda"!
In any other setting Bennison would simply have been written off as a buffoon in Holy Orders, but his insistence on bringing into the diocese such notable heretics as John Shelby Spong, and the Episcopal Church's First Consecrated Sodomite Bishop, V. Gene Robinson from New Hampshire to ordain the next generation of priests, marked him out as both spiritually hazardous and dangerously heretical to the orthodox.
By most ecclesiastical reckonings his statements alone would be enough to get rid of him. But in a church as theologically lackluster as the Episcopal Church whose theology ranges from Trinitarian to Unitarian and whose sexual beliefs range from hetero to homo (and anything else in between); apparently not.
His disconnectedness and divorce from reality was most highlighted at the recent Diocesan Convention when he said: "This was the best convention" (after they had voted down his budget and mandatory assessment) and "The Diocese has never been in better shape" (after he was asked to resign).
Those who were behind the call for his resignation were clear that the issues were not theological. However, even with accusations of fiscal mismanagement, and misleading his leadership and the distrust of his clergy leadership, the Rev. Bill Wood chairman of the Diocesan Standing Committee said that they could not force him out, "not by canon law".
"We passed a motion asking him to retire or resign as our advice to the bishop," he said. That's the best we can do, he told VirtueOnline in February. The hope was that a massive public relations campaign and a resolution by members of Concerned Episcopalians (the diocese's loyal opposition) to get rid of him at a specially called Diocesan Convention in March (to deal with the diocese's fiscal problems) might do the trick.
When I asked Wood about Bennison's heretical utterances, and why they would they not be enough to get rid of him, he answered, "We are not doctrinal watch dogs".
The Rev. Glen Matis, past chairman of the Standing Committee and a current member, said it was a "matter of trust" that led to the standing committee's seeking his ouster. It was "beyond fiscal", he said, but there was still no proof that he had done anything illegal.
Too many of us, the decline and longed for ouster of the Bishop of Pennsylvania, comes as no surprise as we have watched with pain, shame, infinite credulity and wonderment at a man so infinitely unqualified to shepherd the people of God as a bishop of The Episcopal Church.
That he should have made his way up the ecclesiastical ranks to become the Bishop of Pennsylvania, speaks volumes about those who pick such men (and women), the unbelievable level of theological and spiritual dysfunctionality of clergy and laity alike who push their cause, fulfilling the truism that like picks like, climaxing in the triumph of charm and conviviality over substance and the 'faith once delivered to the saints'.
Charles Bennison was and is the perfect composite of today's imperial Episcopal bishop - a man void of substance, filled with empty rhetoric, - "I am here to embrace and affirm" he once said. In truth he was a hollow man with only mediocre academic and social credentials, badly hidden behind a mask of spiritual vacuity and theological emptiness.
His rise, like his fall, was utterly predictable. He is the perfect example of the disconnected sociopathic bishop. It was only a matter of time before the Standing Committee and Bennison's liberal backers came to the same conclusion; that he was the proverbial bishop with no theological clothes.
His very beginnings as the son of a bishop spoke volumes.
Bennison's claims to theological idiocy came naturally. He was rejected for postulancy by his father's examining chaplains when he sought to go to seminary because he barely knew the books of the bible and only got in because his mother insisted and his father, also a revisionist bishop, got bullied by his wife. That should have tipped the hands of the search committee looking for a new Pennsylvania bishop, but Bennison had long since learned that smiles, charm and a brand name could replace sound doctrine, and he easily wooed those "examining" him. He had come from the Cambridge, Mass-based Episcopal Divinity School whose president at the time, the former Utah bishop Otis Charles would later dump his wife and five kids to "marry" a four times married man.
With standards fast declining in the now liberal controlled seminaries and where knowledge of the Bible and theology was fast evaporating, (seven of the nine seminaries no longer really believe the Atonement matters), Bennison sailed through effortlessly. Charles E. Bennison was on his way.
The first public signs of his disconnectedness would now become evident.
Though superficially connected with the content of Holy Scripture, and believing as he later articulated, that the church wrote the bible and could therefore re-write it, Bennison went on a campaign of saying and doing anything he felt was in his own interests, those of his liberal peers in the House of Bishops, and occasionally, but not always, of those he considered the dioceses' powerbrokers.
Both his pastorates in California and Atlanta ended disastrously. He was asked to leave both parishes, but not before he managed to cut deals demanding their silence on why he was being dumped. Heaven forbid that anyone else who might employ him should ever find out the truth!
A couple formerly from St. Luke's parish in Atlanta where Bennison was the rector, and not bound by such an oath of silence, told VOL that their minimal experience of him was disastrous. "He was disruptive. He was not popular and he had a hard time with the bishop, Frank Allen. The problems could not be worked out. The vestry decided he needed to go." And go he did.
His penultimate landing, and a fitting weigh station to his final destination in Pennsylvania, was the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an institution described by one orthodox theologian as a "proto-Marxist, any orifice, feminist, institution", that neither St. Paul, St Augustine nor Athanasius, would ever recognize.
Needless to say Bennison felt himself right at home and with a title of professor of "Pastoral Theology and Congregational Studies" he set about indoctrinating the next generation of students into the joys of theological pragmatism, with no historic base. (If the Bible could be re-written why not re-write it to say whatever you wanted it to say, including matters of human sexuality, especially if it was congenial to the cultural zeitgeist). Bennison was at home in his new milieu. At the seminary Bennison was happy to push the church's official pansexual line.
But his eye and goal was always to be a bishop - like his father.
An opening in the Diocese of Pennsylvania proved to alluring. The outgoing Allen Bartlett, a weak, liberal bishop, but more understanding of the orthodox parishes in his diocese, had cut a deal, allowing the "seven sisters" as they were known, a flying bishop in exchange for money and peace. The arrangement worked.
When Bennison presented himself to the various committees and groups that made up the complex diocese, he promised to continue the same arrangement with the Anglo-Catholic priests, but within weeks of being consecrated, he reneged on the deal saying that it violated his authority to have another bishop come in from the outside. The betrayal of the orthodox rectors hit them hard. They had voted for him rather than the evangelical rector Dave Thomas, and now Bennison had turned on them.
It was the first sign of his disconnectedness, but only one of many during his tenure as bishop.
Thus began a series of long, expensive, drawn out legal battles over inhibitions, depositions, and property ownership with three parishes. It was a nightmare without end. And it will not be over, even if Bennison is shown the door. Fr. Moyer's lawsuit for fraud, concealment of evidence, and denial of due process will continue whether or not Charles Bennison is the bishop of the diocese. It should be noted that both Fr. Moyer's lawsuit and the presentment charge Bennison with concealing evidence.
From the beginning, Bennison went on a spending spree estimated by one priest at close to $20 million, which included a makeover of the cathedral, the purchase of Camp Wapiti, worthless education programs that yielded little or nothing, high-priced consultants and more, with the promise that it would all come back in a Capital Finance Campaign he would undertake. The campaign never materialized even though over $500,000 was spent on consultants, and Bennison went on spending like there was no tomorrow. It was further evidence of his increasing disconnectedness that he could not hear the rumblings of discontent from his leaders over this free spending of diocesan funds, with many of these expenditures having no support from the Standing Committee. It is still unknown if there is $4 million or nothing left in the unrestricted funds held by the diocese.
But even in his disconnectedness Bennison was shrewd and cunning. He formed a finance and property committee that he chose and that answered only to him and not to the Standing Committee. This hand-picked group allowed him almost carte blanche access to unrestricted diocesan assets and Bennison made the most of it. It is reported that the chairman of that committee once said, "It is my job to find money for the bishop."
At the same time he began to bully and arm-twist the larger parishes for more money to pay for his spendthrift ways. He came down on them hard with threats and more, but many held their ground knowing the diocese had no mandatory clause demanding they HAD to give. They balked. Bennison lost.
Bennison tried unsuccessfully to change that. At the most recent Diocesan Convention he tried to push through a mandatory assessment clause, but a coalition of conservative and liberal priests, smelling a financial rat let loose in the diocese eating at their precious assets shot him down. A coalition of liberal and conservatives, uniting under the banner of Concerned Pennsylvania Episcopalians, successfully fought back the "mandatory assessment" (deep-sixing with it a $4.8 million budget) setting Bennison back on his heels. It was the final straw for the Standing Committee and the beginning of the end for Charles Bennison, the disconnected bishop of Pennsylvania.
If his financial mismanagement was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, his earlier theological statements uttered from pulpit and newspaper alike, revealed an even deeper disconnectedness.
From his earliest statement to an orthodox congregation in Paoli, Pennsylvania, "that the church wrote the Bible and the church could re-write it", to even more outrageous statements that "Jesus was a sinner (not sinless) who forgave himself" and "Jesus winked at sin", the disconnectedness, bewildered liberals and angered orthodox clergy alike, who felt that Bennison was now in better company with Arius than Athanasius.
Bennison's so-called diversity of viewpoints (allowing all voices to be heard) slowly saw an extinguishing of the orthodox voice, and in its place he openly promoted the acceptability and blessing of deviant sexual behavior, promoting these behaviors as "civil rights." A clergy couple caught promoting Wicca (white witchcraft) got little more than a wrist slap from Bennison. The husband finally departed the priesthood, the wife stayed on in her parish.
[Paragraph redacted.]
But that didn't stop Bennison from going after the property of St. James the Less. The orthodox Anglo-Catholic parish priest Fr. David Ousley was forced out of his parish after 22 years, and a school was closed, because Ousley couldn't take any more of Bennison's heresies and simply wanted out.
But Bennison's inarticulate heresies and apostasies, which he believed to be embracing of all, appeared regularly in his own diocesan newspaper, The Pennsylvanian Episcopalian. They were truly alarming, providing endless grist for this writer, but few if any of his clergy publicly said or did anything to oppose him or raise an outcry for his removal.
But fear had settled over the diocese. Diocesan headquarters was a revolving door of consultants and staff. Hardly anyone stayed on the staff too long. If you were a financially poor congregation that depended on diocesan funds you risked losing that diocesan money if you dared oppose the bishop. If you were a financially independent parish and tried to refuse Bennison the right to visit, or refused to share Eucharist with him you risked being inhibited and deposed. There was always uncertainty how it would go, as several orthodox parish priests found out.
One priest who went out on a limb and publicly challenged Bennison was the Anglo-Catholic rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd, in Rosemont, Pa., the Rev. Dr. David L. Moyer.
Moyer asked him point blank if he would or could affirm a number of basic doctrines of the Christian Faith like the bodily resurrection of Jesus, Christ's atoning sacrifice for sin and more. Caught in the headlights, Bennison knew that by saying that he did, he risked being called a liar, by saying he didn't; he risked being called a hypocrite. Bennison punted.
After his illegal and fraudulent "deposition" Fr. Moyer was received into the Diocese of Pittsburgh, later received by the Archbishop of Central Africa, Bernard Malango. At one point, during his fight with Bishop Bennison, Fr. Moyer was so concerned for the souls and spiritual welfare of his people that he took a number of them for church initiation up to an Anglo-Catholic parish in Allentown in the Diocese of Bethlehem. Bennison used that event as "abandoning the Communion of the Church."
Moyer was subsequently inhibited and deposed by Bennison, but the bishop's use of the wrong canon to get rid of Moyer cost him dearly. Despite two multi-million dollar lawsuits were filed by his attorney, John H. Lewis, Jr., against Bennison, and Moyer is still in his parish, where he was recently consecrated a bishop in the Traditional Anglican Communion - the largest body of traditionalist Anglicans outside of the Anglican Communion.
For his outrageous actions towards Fr. Moyer, Bennison found himself publicly rapped by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Frank T. Griswold's private correspondence with Bennison revealed an unhappy PB, pleading with Bennison not to pursue his course of action against Moyer; for fear that it would further isolate and alienate not only Griswold himself but the Episcopal Church from the Anglican Communion. Ironically, Griswold's letter telling Bennison to stop the proceedings against Fr. Moyer was concealed by Bennison from the Standing Committee.
Citing the 13th century Mystic poet Sufi Rumi, Griswold abruptly told Bennison to find a way through the problem and "to meet me on a plain beyond good and evil" with the issue resolved. It never happened. Griswold made threats to act against Bennison, but he never went through with it. A stalemate ensued. It was back to business as usual.
On another occasion Bennison tried to ram a "sin of heterosexism" resolution through the House of Bishops. It failed, but he was, he said; ready to marry two homosexuals in the cathedral.
"Bennison's statement goes against everything the Christian Church has taught," said the retired Bishop of South Carolina Dr. C. FitzSimons Allison, the brainiest bishop in the House of Bishops.
Quoting scripture, Allison said that, 'He who knew no sin, became sin for us in order that we might become the righteousness of God.' "Bennison's statement contradicts Holy Scripture, the 39 Articles, denies the creedal affirmation, violates his oath of office as bishop and his baptism vows, his confirmation and ordination on the basis of no biblical evidence. His sole authority is his own solipsism."
"If the HOB believes in the historical faith and their consecration vows, he [Bennison] should be censured, tried and deposed," said Allison. Of course it never happened. The HOB has no stomach for heresy trials as the Righter Trial revealed and Bennison rightly surmised.
Earlier, British theologian, the Rev. Canon Dr. Michael Green, author and evangelist told delegates to the U.S. Anglican Congress in Atlanta that Canadian Bishop Michael Ingham and ECUSA Bishop Charles Bennison were so apostate that their Sees should be declared "vacant."
Green, who teaches at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford told more than 300 bishops, priests and laity that Spong went unrebuked for his consistent denial of every single Christian doctrine and Bennison and Ingham are simply tarred with the same brush.
"These bishops have caused nothing but pain and a massive draining away of godly people. They have caused schism and despair and their Sees should now be declared vacant," said Green.
One incident that pointed up the disconnectedness of Bennison from any kind of reality, took place when four orthodox Primates of the Anglican Communion, representing more than 40 million Anglicans worldwide, showed up in Philadelphia to inaugurate the Anglican Relief and Development Fund, a counter movement to the national church's Episcopal Relief and Development Fund.
The four primates appeared at a country club to address a group of local orthodox Episcopalians and Bennison showed up uninvited. The four primates were immediately herded into a separate room and a guard placed at the door so Bennison could not barge in and introduce himself. The Primates wanted to be clear that they considered Bennison a heretic and wanted no fellowship with him at all.
Bennison stayed in the main room where most of the people were assembled and proceeded to lecture them on inclusivity and diversity and why he had come to "embrace all". At one point during his peroration he placed his hand on this writer's shoulder and said, "This is my friend David Virtue!" causing eyebrows to rise around the room.
Everybody was stunned, so indeed was this writer. While I have always been cordial to Bennison on the occasions we have met, I have never regarded him as my "friend."
But mounting anxieties about Bennison's leadership were finally filtering through to the Standing Committee, itself a body of liberal clergy and laity disposed to believing in Bennison. The die was cast for asking him to go.
A former head of the Standing committee admitted to a reporter with United Press International, that it was not just about the money, other "non-fiscal issues" were involved. Indeed they were. Many clergy tell stories of being lied to, publicly embarrassed, and their voices entirely disregarded.
Charles E. Bennison has been given the option of resigning or retiring. He has refused either option saying it was God's will he should stay on after much prayer.
Now that he has been inhibited he will still face a million dollar lawsuit from Fr. Moyer for wrongful dismissal. His woes will not be over.
The truth is, Bishop Bennison is not unlike a score of revisionist ECUSA bishops who long ago forfeited their right even to be called "bishop" for their theological and moral positions, and their failure to see Holy Scripture as authoritative for the church.
The depth of his disconnectedness is truly appalling and unparalleled. He is disconnected theologically; disconnected from the church's moral teachings, disconnected now from his priests, disconnected from how a diocese should be run, disconnected on how money should be spent, and ultimately disconnected from God.
Bennison is among the worst of the House of Bishops. The depth of his disconnectedness and venality was and is truly appalling and unparalleled.
With his departure the diocese will have to repair itself. It is unlikely they will choose a a new bishop of orthodox conviction, but at least for the moment, the remaining orthodox priests and parishes in the diocese can breath again.
END
November 1, 2007 - All Saints Day
Press statement by the The Rt. Rev. Dr. David L. Moyer
It is indeed a very serious thing in the life of the Church when a bishop or priest is inhibited from his ministry. Charles Bennison is in my prayers that this situation brings him to repentance, and back to the faith and order of the Church Catholic.
It is ironic that Charles Bennison will be put in trial before the Church for a pastoral failure to report his brother's sexual misconduct and to protect a young teenage girl and others from his brother where Bishop Bennison denied me a Church trial as I sought to report his theological misconduct and protect my people and others from him.
The Presentment shows the same pattern of conduct of the concealing of evidence that my attorneys discovered occurred in his actions against me.
Whatever happens to Charles Bennison in church proceedings, my litigation will continue unless resolved with a satisfactory settlement.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.