Sydney Anglican Customs
As an American, I ask this just out of curiosity: I know there are parishes in the Diocese of Sydney that are out of sync with the predominant evangelical way of doing things down there. When the bishops take part in services in traditional BCP or Anglo-Catholic parishes (IIRC, there are some), do they wear episcopal vestments and preside as one would expect in the particular milieu?
Comments
None has presided to my knowledge (trying to think hard who presides at the induction of a new rector). That's done by the rector concerned. The Bp will do the episcopal part, confirmation etc, and preach.
Visiting bishops from other dioceses do what they'd normally do - mitres, croziers, signing and so forth. One or 2 of the older parishioners will call the visitor My Lord and kneel as they process past.
The first banning of the chasuble was in 1911, by the the Abp. In the late '40s Synod passed a canon formalising the ban.
And they claim to be Anglican???!!!!
I've never been to an Anglican/Episcopal communion service where they didn't read the Gospel and then usually preach on the Gospel and sometimes other Biblical readings. I'd hardly call it an either/or situation.
I'd not heard of it. That's no guarantee of course.
Unrelated, but at an NYC Reform Synagogue I visited once for their Friday evening service, on the way out of the Synagogue at the end in the vestibule the Rabbi blessed a loaf of challah and wine in little sippy cups which the congregation shared. There was a bit of mingling afterwards but not much. I don't know if it was supposed to replace the family Shabbat dinner prayers or supplement them. I don't know how common this, especially since I am not Jewish! This was also a pretty liberal congregation with a band with drums and guitars, although the service, aside from the sermon, was mostly sung in Hebrew (led by a cantor) to traditional (or at least traditional-sounding) melodies.
You're certainly right in talking of their lack of tolerance for diversity.
That last point is two words too long.
Three years ago an old friend who had married an Australian came to stay for a month, someone I thought I knew and had remembered with fondness. Talk about changed: she made the average National Front member look like a dangerously left-wing liberal wet, and the attitudes were even more extreme when it came to "sin" (which seemed to include practically everything) and "going against God's law" (I think if God had come down he'd have been found to be against His law too according to her).
Never again
Though as I understand it, cassock, gown and bands was how Anglican priests in the 18th C typically vested.
?
... and, increasingly, NT
Christ Church St Laurence?
The "femaleness" is complex, if I can put it that way! There is an "out" in Sydney style probity that permits a woman leadership roles if no men are present - for example standing orders were suspended at one stage in the Diocese of Armidale so a woman could be ordained as a school chaplain for a girls' school. In the remote communities of Arnhemland there are, sadly, often no "functioning" males as a result of decades of substance abuse, imprisonment, suicide and low life expectancy in general. The women have kept alive the flames of functionality and faith, the former in the wider community and the latter of course in the church communities. The communities are often cut off from the rest of the world for many months, at least for land-based travel and even much telecommunication, for many months during The Wet.
The current bishop certainly represents a liberalised version of Sydney. Just. Which in rough terms means he might wear silly clothes (as they would see it unofficially) in extremis. Clothes at all are something of a struggle in many parts of the diocese, with massive and hot humidity in the north in The Wet, and fierce heat elsewhere, though south of about Katherine it can cool down overnight in the Dry (which becomes "winter" as you move south). So the occasional donning of oddities is not hugely significant, and there's few clergy left in the diocese who would wear a chazzie.
So it's hard to extrapolate directly from Sydney, but there's no doubt that there's very little non-Sydney presence from the South Australian border north, now.
I think you've missed everything I've said. There is an A-C tradition in the Sydney diocese, but it is very much a minority one. Sydney has been low church almost from its foundation. It very nearly wasn't, with 3 additional priests sent from England in the 1840s, all of them very much of the Oxford Movement. Sadly, 2 of the 3 swam the Tiber very shortly after arrival and there was a severe reaction. But amongst the low church majority, there was a strong MOTR minority as well as a much smaller A-C group. Starting in the 1980s the Moore College group became much more powerful, taking over many of the traditional low church and MOTR parishes .
I don't know of any "continuing Anglican body" in Sydney. There s one group, dedicated to Our Lady, which is not part of the diocese but AFAIK is not affiliated with any continuing Anglican body. There are very few members of such a body anywhere in Aust for that matter.
But it seems pretty obvious that Christ Church St Laurence (in the Sydney diocese) ignores the ban on chasubles, as evidence from one of the pictures on its website. In the third picture on the front page, almost to the end, you see a man holding the processional cross. He might be a deacon, but he is wearing a chasuble.
Looks like a tunicle to me (akin to a deacon's dalmatic but simpler in detail and worn by subdeacons and often crucifers, who may be the same person in some parishes). Difference from a chasuble is that a tunicle has sleeves.
But use of a tunicle would, I expect, be objectionable in Sydney as it's generally part of a set with the chasuble and dalmatic in a solemn Mass. Or perhaps the letter of the law is still upheld, with the chasuble being the one specifically banned vestment?
As I understand it, CCSL has three sacred ministers with the celebrant attired in a cope and the deacon and subdeacon in the traditional vestments, very much upholding the letter of the law.... In every other respect, it is very much an "advanced" Anglo-Catholic parish.
It most definitely is a tunicle. It's very similar to a dalmatic, so similar that it's a tunicle when worn by an acolyte and a dalmatic when worn by a deacon (or the other way round, I can never remember). And your comments about CCSL are quite correct.
kmann - Anglo-Catholics are not at all popular with the dominant group in the diocese. But very, very few make the move to Rome or elsewhere. They would do so for teaching not because they felt "driven out". I imagine very few low-church Anglicans in Chichester or Brisbane for example leave the Anglican church either.
Judging from what I know of Sinny, that's pretty horrible.