The Episcopal Electoral College for Tuam, Killala and
Achonry, meeting last Wednesday in Church House, Armagh, failed to appoint a new
Bishop.
The decision now passes to the House of Bishops, which will meet shortly.
In a sermon before the meeting, the Archbishop of Armagh said, “The
responsibility of an Episcopal Electoral College is to seek the mind of
God through the promptings of the Holy Spirit in order to identify one
who is called and equipped to be a bishop in the Church of God. That
exercise is conducted in a particular context: that of a vacant see with
all its individual idiosyncrasies, challenges and opportunities; but we
are here to choose a bishop for the Church and not solely for the
vacant see.”
He later said, “A bishop is given particular jurisdiction in and to
his own diocese. Those who gather round their bishop, to whom that
bishop in a special way belongs, and who belong reciprocally to her or
to him, constitute (in the theology of some,) “the local church.”
Thus
specific responsibility and jurisdiction belongs to the bishop in the
local church. Yet, just as the people of Tuam belong to a greater entity
– the Church of Ireland, and the Church of Ireland to a greater entity –
the universal Church of God, so the Bishop of Tuam co-relates to those
greater entities also, and must be equipped so to do, not least so that
she or he may be that organic link which relates the local to the
universal and the universal to the local. So, we are not here today to
elect an archdeacon or a rural dean, for these are merely internal
diocesan functions; we are here to elect a bishop whose breadth of
vision and responsibility must encompass the parochial, the diocesan and
the global.”