Bennison doesn't believe in the resurrection of Jesus, but he is a profound believer in his own resurrection. He is a survivor no one wants to save. There are no nail prints in Bennison's hands, no spear-pierced side. There is just membership in TEC and the Union League Club. Bennison doesn't feel any pain. You see he is a narcissist and a sociopath who believes profoundly in himself and his need to survive even to the point of calling those who accused him of covering up his brother's sexual abuse of a minor perjurers.

Lies trip out of his mouth like his equally bad theology. You can believe anything or nothing, as far as Charles Bennison is concerned, as long as the "anything" doesn't include orthodoxy. Be a Wiccan, practice sodomy, call Jesus a sinner who forgave himself, call the growth of Anglicanism in Africa like the growth of the Nazi Party...the heresies that pour out of his mouth are endless, vulgar and, in his case, mindless. If you want to go the full nine yards, write a Visigoth Rite and offer it up at the cathedral for those wishing to marry who might, ahem, be of the same sex or transgendered even. Charles will smile his way through the service thinking he is doing you and God a favor. Then when he's done, he lets it be known that his real hero is Jack Spong, not Jesus Christ.

Bennison's soliloquy on liberation in his (2010) Lenten message addresses the issue of the misuse of power. He opines, "The 'Arab Spring' now sweeping across the Mideast - the Mediterranean area dominated in New Testament times by the Roman Empire - and our own Midwest should come as no surprise to us whose religion, like the Judaism whence it emerged, began as a resistance movement against Rome's tyranny, injustice, and oppression. (After Christianity was co-opted by the Empire, Islam arose in opposition to them both)."

And what of the oppression and misuse of power he has administered on the orthodox in his diocese over the years. It is an oppression that has caused many of them to flee and whose parishes he has torn from them in the name of a god unrecognizable from pagan deities. Consider also the oppression he has visited upon women in the diocese who are so afraid to speak up for fear they will lose their jobs. Then there is the black priest he hounded into the grave, whose wife blasted Bennison in a hospital room where the priest lay dying.

In less than two weeks, he will be back in court to seize the parish of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont from its priest. Then he will start on others as he slowly works his way down the list of those who dare stand for the "faith once delivered for all to the saints".

In the end "Rome's tyranny, injustice and oppression" is not unlike his own tyranny against those who stand in opposition to his decade long reign of ecclesiastical terror.

That the disgraced bishop hangs on to his ecclesiastical seat because of a technicality of canon law does not exonerate him. The charge of conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy still stands, that the Statute of limitations ran out does not dismiss his guilt. He is narcissistic enough to want the job more than shame or life itself. That Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori with her new found powers, is either unwilling or unable to get rid of him despite a personal appeal by the PA Standing Committee, speaks volumes.

"That story, our focus in Lent, calls us to be an Exodus people of liberation," writes Bennison. Indeed, and a lot of orthodox Episcopalians would like to experience the same "Exodus" liberation from Charles E. Bennison.

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