Perhaps you remember that Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church (TEC), has taken to quoting Hildegard von Bingen, 12th Century Sibyl of the Rhine. For Schori, Hildegard is all about viriditas (greenness), like a latter-day Gaia worshiping U.N. apparatchik.
Here's Schori, apparently oblivious to irony, referring to her new patron rebuking Barbarossa for fueling Church schism:
Listen to Hildegard the prophet: “He Who Is says, ‘I destroy contumacy, and by myself I crush the resistance of those who despise me. Woe, woe to the malice of wicked men who defy me! Hear this, king, if you wish to live; otherwise my sword shall smite you.”
And here's Hildegard again, preaching on the Cathar heretics:
"Diabolical seduction [by the Cathars] gives rise to
criminals and seducers, the hate and the crime of the devil, brigands and
thieves; but it is in homosexuality that the sin is most impure, the
root of all vices. When these sins have accumulated among the nations the constitution of God’s law will be torn, and the
Church, like a widow, will be stricken."
Hildegard |
Why didn't Jefferts Schori reference that, when preaching to her crew of greenist mountebanks in Taiwan?
We'll return to Hildegard and her apocalyptic visions later. In the meanwhile, KJS, be very careful when invoking the Teutonic Seer.
Mind how you go,
LSP