Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

“Progressive” Episcopal bishop Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde hectoring Pres Trump at the national prayer service for securing the border and defending the traditional family heralds another step in the Episcopal Church’s headlong run to irrelevancy. Henry VIII whose schism with Rome created the Anglican Church would have clapped Rev. Budde in the Tower for lese majesty and rung up the headsman for an appointment.

“The Church of Good Taste,” once the pillar of the American establishment, has been in decline for years. It began with female ordination in the mid nineteen seventies, then female bishops, then regularizing homosexuality, then homosexual clergy and now endorsing the unscientific and immoral transgender movement. From 1975 to 2022 membership dropped approximately 51%. In a vain effort to stanch hemorrhaging members and desperate to recruit for declining congregations they abandoned scripture and capitulated to the “progressive” zeitgeist causing the more orthodox members to flee the fold. At one Lambeth Conference the good African bishops told their white confreres they needed an exorcism over the homosexual issue.

As if breaching their own traditions and the teachings of the Apostles were not enough the bishops have embarked on a disastrous voyage into leftist senility embracing every politically correct absurdity. The rector of St. John’s Episcopal in the nation’s capital had her George Floyd moment even as the mob tried to burn down the historic church. Just across the river in Alexandria, Virginia the rector of Christ Church removed a plaque commemorating George Washington in public atonement for Washington owning slaves. As their numbers drop the more relentlessly “progressive” they become. It is madness, “self-inflicted suicide” in New York City cop speak.

Some parishes of the Episcopal communion have fled this insanity, a segment now calling themselves Anglican instead of Episcopalian, others have come over to Rome lock, stock, and barrel. Crossing the Tiber, they have been granted an Anglican ordinariate retaining their traditions. How long that will last in the Vatican’s anti-tradition climate is anyone’s guess.

My own Catholic Church isn’t much better than the Lord Bishops of the Episcopal communion. They seem determined to follow the Episcopalians into oblivion with a hierarchy more interested in a sinecure than salvation. Sermons on sin are gone, social justice is the new commandment. We are to fawn over illegal aliens even as our communities are destroyed and our citizens murdered by Latin American thugs. We are to atone for “whiteness” instead of actual sins. That the rush to be relevant makes them more irrelevant is illustrated by the hostility to the traditional Latin Mass whose parishes are filled while others are empty. And it goes beyond language. Many years ago I viewed a high Episcopal service in Boston at the Church of the Advent. If an English language liturgy were wanted that was the way to go. It was magnificent, far superior to the heretical piffle at the Jesuit Church I had just walked out of.

What are ordinary parishioners to make of this ecclesiastical trahison des clercs? Quo Vadis Christians? Whither goest thou when the shepherds abjure scripture to embrace progressivist twaddle?

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William Layer

Lt. Colonel Civil Affairs, USAR (ret) served twenty-six years in the regular and reserve components of the US Army. He was civil military liaison for the 260th Military Police, DC National Guard, State Public Affairs Officer, Commander of the Public Affairs unit and a counter-drug intelligence analyst. Transferring to the 352 Civil Affairs Command as monuments and archives officer, he became the Command Public Affairs Officer in Iraq as well as liaison to local Iraqi leaders and acting Secretary to the General Staff. He was instrumental in recovering photographic artifacts of the Iraqi Royal family while in Baghdad. He was wounded in action in an ambush in Feb. 2004 for which he was awarded the Purple Heart.
In his civilian career he worked primarily in Army Public Affairs and for the Air Force as historian to the presidential wing in the early Reagan administration and later for Air Force Legislative Liaison covering congressional hearings and assisting in preparing testimony for senior leaders.
His essays and reviews have appeared in the scholarly and popular press including Asian Affairs and the Washington Times. He is co-author, with Ali Wahab, of The Iraqi Royal Family, a Collection of Photographs Recovered from The Ruins of the Zuhur Palace, 2004.
A native New Yorker, he holds a BA with honors in history from Findlay College (Ohio) and an MA in history from The Ohio State University. He is a graduate of the US Army Command & General Staff College and was graduated with distinction US Naval War College with a MA in National Security and Strategic Studies.

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