Danforth, also a former U.S. envoy to Sudan, told the Presiding Bishop's forum, "Toward a Reconciled World," at the convention on June 15 that "Virtually all of the public attention on this General Convention has been on the issue of sexual orientation...bear in mind that over 99 percent of the people in the United States are not Episcopalians and they really don't care, with all due respect, Bishop Griswold, who our bishops are. And they don't care whether rites for blessing same-sex relationships are found in the prayer book or on the Internet. It's not on their screen and I can't give you data relating to the three quarters of one percent who are Episcopalians, but I bet you the average person in the pew doesn't care much either. ... whatever you do on the Sunday after this convention adjourns, all of these people, including yours truly in St. Louis, Missouri, are simply going to toddle off to church on Sunday just the way we always did."

Danforth told the 500 attendees, "I believe that the central message of the Episcopal Church and of all Christians is and should be that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and that he has entrusted to us the ministry of reconciliation. When Jesus prayed that we all may be one, didn't he mean it? So that to me is particularly the message of the Episcopal Church. We have always, always seen ourselves as the middle way. We have always seen ourselves as the place where all kinds of people can come together around the same altar and say the same liturgy and have all kinds of different views, all kinds of political views, theological views. That's the Episcopal Church and it's going to continue to be the Episcopal Church. ... It's not a wimpy message. It's a prophetic message. It's a message that God is transcendent and God transcends any of our perceptions of God and that God is big enough to incorporate and encompass the perceptions of all kinds of people, even those with whom we most adamantly disagree. And if this is the message of our Episcopal Church we're no longer going to be seven tenths of one percent of the population that nobody cares about. We are going to be the church with a message that the world is waiting for."

In return, Griswold gave Danforth the "Presiding Bishop's Award for Faith and Public Service."

The former Senator warned against schism, and scored traditional Anglicans who have seceded from TEC: "If we can't hold ourselves together, it's hard to see how we can present ourselves as a force to hold the world together, and, if we can't exchange the peace with one another, it is hard to explain to people how we purport to be agents of peace. A broken church is a sad church. There are these little splinter churches, and I read the paper in St. Louis in which they have little ads for so-called Anglican churches. Maybe they are.

I don't know what they are. One of them meets in a mortuary and it's not one of these bright colonial mortuaries, either. Its limestone and stained wood and then the Sunday School meets for 45 minutes...I don't want to make fun of people, but it's sad. A broken church is a sad church. Don't be a sad church. Don't go to the mortuary before it's absolutely necessary. So I plead with you ladies and gentlemen. Figure out a way to hold this together."

At the beginning of his speech (titled "The right church at the right time"), Danforth criticized the Senate for taking up hot-button social issues during a time of war and economic peril: "It's a far more dangerous and unpredictable world than it was during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union as it was, was at least predictable, and it wasn't crazy. We are dependent, increasingly, in the United States and in the world, on oil from the most unstable parts of the world. Without it, our economy, our way of life, is radically changed.

The energy policy that we now have in the [U.S.] is such that it can be boiled down into hoping for warm winters and cool summers. We're in the process now of raising the debt ceiling of the government to $10 trillion. The federal debt has gone up 47 percent in this decade and we are increasingly vulnerable to the good will and the confidence of other countries that invest in the [U.S.]. Our two major social benefit programs are facing bankruptcy in the foreseeable future: Medicare in 12 years and Social Security in 34 years.

And against this backdrop the [U.S.] Senate...voted a few weeks ago that the Star Spangled Banner should be sung in English. It spent three days debating an amendment to the federal constitution designed to define what marriage is and the Senate is poised later this month to take [up] the constitutional amendment to prohibit burning the American flag."

At the start of May, before the Senate defeated a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, Danforth had said the same to the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay caucus within the GOP: "Once before, the constitution was amended to try to deal with matters of human behavior; that was prohibition. That was such a flop that that was repealed 13 years later." Referring to the marriage amendment, Danforth said that perhaps at some point in history there was a constitutional amendment proposed that was "sillier than this one, but I don't know of one." With his repeated calls for moderation and his attacks on the Evangelical Right, Danforth has won praise from Democratic liberals (including President Carter).

Sources: Episcopal News Service, The Associated Press, cbsnews.com, The Washington Post

---Lee Penn is a writer and Episcopalian-turned-Eastern Rite Catholic living in Palo Alto, California. He recently authored FALSE DAWN: THE UNITED RELIGIONS INITIATIVE, GLOBALISM, AND THE QUEST FOR A ONE-WORLD RELIGION (Sophia Perennis Press).