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.”
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