Bishops take note!

I am grateful to Dr Jim Ryland who provides a very clear illustration for the need for Anglicanism to stop fragmenting. There are too many bishops out there with their own agenda, and unifying the church is not it, quite frankly, to their shame.

We have all, in our own ways, acknowledged some personal alarm at the rampant fragmentation of our Catholic Anglican Church. Someone aptly referred to it as "purple fever" as bishops tread on other's jurisdictions or occasionally split off for some rather petty and questionable reasons.I grew up on a ranch in the, then, rural area of Southern California. The great Edwin G. Hart ranch had, by the 1930s, been parceled into several smaller but still quite sizable ranches. Over half of the original holding was still in a single parcel of many thousands of acres. Edwin, and later, his widow, Adelaide, leased the land to the remainder of some early Basque shepherding families. I grew up among the Arroueses, Bastenchurys, Yorbas, and Essevary families. They seemed one vast Catholic family but the Basque temperament sometimes led to territorial disputes over grazing rights or a stray in the wrong fold.

The pastoral life has largely disappeared from the American scene but during those early years of my life I learned a lesson that forever colored my view of pastoral responsibility, both in the field and in the church.

I doubt that any of you have witnessed what happens when two shepherds go to war. It is a truly horrible thing. While the men fight and grapple the flocks panic and run amok. I remember, as a boy, helping Jean Pierre Arroues disentangle lacerated lambs from barbed-wire fences and watching in silence as he used his rifle to dispatch ewes trampled beyond the possibility of salvation.

In parables, Our Lord always spoke of the flock with great and gentle love, but most of His words for the shepherds were those of admonition.

Dr Jim Ryland