Anglican Priest Tells Students of Value of Chastity

Anglican Bishop Graham Leonard, whose opposition to the ordination of women as priests has sparked a controversy within the Church of England, spoke to graduates of an Anaheim Christian law school Sunday about “the splendor of chastity” and the danger of anything less than that in today’s world.

“I suspect that many people in the world today . . . would suppose that I might as well speak of the glory of imprisonment or the beauty of torture, as talk of the splendor of chastity,” said Leonard in his commencement address to graduates of the Simon Greenleaf School of Law. “Christian teaching on sex, which has been the basis of our Western civilization, has as its two pillars abstinence outside marriage and faithfulness within it.”

But these requirements today are widely regarded as “unnatural and impossible to observe”--faulty beliefs that have contributed to the spread of AIDS, Leonard said.

Leonard, a respected conservative theologian, suggested that so-called “safe sex” campaigns and the search for a cure for acquired immune deficiency syndrome may actually hinder the disease’s complete eradication.

While AIDS has led some people “to change their attitude towards promiscuity, this has sprung largely from fear,” he said. “Calls for cures and preventive measures . . . enable people to continue their present actions, rather than to change their lives.”

Leonard, who as bishop of London is the third-ranking prelate in the Anglican church, opposes the church synod’s decision last February to allow the ordination of women as priests and eventually as bishops.

Leonard says that would break with 1,900 years of religious tradition, and he has come to the defense of American priests who think similarly.

Last year, Leonard traveled to Broken Arrow, Okla., where an Episcopal priest had been removed from his parish because he refused to accept women priests.

The bishop defended the priest, the Rev. John Pasco, and said that he still recognized him as a valid clergyman, despite warnings from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Episcopal Church House of Bishops to respect the American church’s autonomy. (The Episcopal church is the American offshoot of the Anglican church.)

Honorary Degree Received

At a press conference on Saturday, Leonard said, “I felt it my duty to go” to Oklahoma because “there is a situation we have got to acknowledge.”

Leonard was in Orange County this weekend to receive an honorary doctor of laws degree from the small, 8-year-old law school, where students take courses in theology, ethics and human rights as well as in torts and contracts.

At Sunday’s graduation ceremony, held at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Orange, Leonard did not speak about the ordination issue, focusing his address instead on the practical and spiritual virtues of chastity.

“By chastity, all evils are defeated . . . (for example), the evil of being a slave of your body . . . (and) the evil of infidelity,” said the bishop in a soft-spoken and professorial manner. “Animals behave instinctively by their nature, they are meant to do so. Human beings are not. When they behave like animals, they drop far lower.”

Sex may bring pleasure, Leonard said, but chastity provides “a very high and particular joy.”