Monday, July 03, 2006
THE FIRST GAY CHURCH
Last week I blogged websites demonstrating Apostolic Succession stemming from Fr. Joseph Rene Vilatte, and also blogged evidence that the diocesan website of the Episcopal Diocese of Fond du Lac presented the history of Fr. Vilatte's activities in the Fond du Lac viscinity.
While looking at the concept of "clustering" in the Roman Catholic Church, it became apparent that also located in Fond du Lac is a clustered Roman Catholic parish formed out of six previous Catholic parishes. Holy Family Catholic Community is well advanced in promoting whatever chaos and remake the American bishops have in mind for the Church Christ established.
If you want to read through that material, you can find it here:
6/27/06 "Are you ready for the cluster parish?"
6/27/06 "Bishop Lennon has been involved with cluster parishes"
6/27/06 "Clustering is not about lack of priests"
6/27/06 "Cluster parish"
6/29/06 "Clustering"
6/30/06 "Vilatte, Old Catholics, and Anglicans"
7/2/06 "Cluster comes home"
Wikipedia gives the history of Vilatte's tangled web of Apostolic Succession in describing the lineage of the Orthodox-Catholic Church of America (OCCA):
The Orthodox-Catholic Church of America was established in the United States in 1892 under the mandate of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius-Peter IV. The founding Archbishop, Mar Timotheus (Joseph René Vilatte) had been ordained priest by Bishop Herzog of the Old Catholic Church in Bern Switzerland on June 7, 1885. Working in Great Lakes area, predominantly in Wisconsin, Fr. Vilatte sought to bring about the return of a Western Rite of Orthodoxy. Much can be said about the politics of those in favor of and those opposed to Fr. Vilatte, but eventually he was consecrated as Archbishop for North America, in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) by Archbishop +Francis Alvarez with the permission of the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch in 1892. OCCA is grounded, therefore, both in the East and in the West.(emphasis mine)
Since the Vilatte succession is used by the Ordo Templi Orientis/Gnostic Catholic Church, an organization that uses sex magick which includes homosexual rituals in the upper degrees, the question comes to mind, does the Vilatte Succession camouflage the Lavendar Mafia? I came a step closer to answering that question last night.
The Wikipedia article linked above describes the Orthodox-Catholic Church of America (OCCA). Googling that title brought up the Religious Archives Network website LGBTRAN - Oral History Project where you can read:
Archbishop Hyde retired in 1983 for health reasons and moved to Belleair on the Florida Gulf Coast. Alfred Lankenau succeeded Hyde as archbishop of the Orthodox Catholic Church of America. When the Lankenau and the OCCA decided to ordain women as priests in 1995, several parishes and priests left in protest. Hyde agreed to come out of retirement and oversee these congregations and priests in a new Autocephalous Orthodox Catholic Church of America. Hyde continues to live in Belleair where he provides guidance for his parishes as well as carries on regular writing and communication with friends and colleagues.
Hyde is credited with opening the first known church that ministered to the homosexual community:
Rev. George Augustine Hyde
George Augustine Hyde (1923), who led the first known church to openly minister to and with homosexuals in the U.S., attended a Roman Catholic seminary, though he left before achieving priestly ordination. He became a high school teacher in Atlanta, Georgia, where he met John Augustine Kazantks, a bishop in the Orthodox Church of Greece, who had been pushed out of his post and his homeland due to his revealing his homosexual orientation. Occasioned by the denial of communion to a group of gay and lesbian Catholics in a local parish, Hyde, with Kazantks' blessing, decided to form an independent Catholic congregation for addressing their needs.
