General Convention takes a first step, admits: ‘Alcohol affects us all’

Bishops and deputies approved task force, update policies

[Episcopal News Service – Salt Lake City] The House of Bishops on July 1 passed three resolutions, one with an amendment, on the issue of alcohol and drug abuse.

“I am Mark and I am an alcoholic,” the Bishop of Ohio, the Rt. Rev. Mark Hollingsworth, said on 1 July 2015 when he rose to introduce three resolutions brought to the House of Bishops by the Legislative Committee on Alcohol and Drug Abuse.

Formed in response to the arrest of the former suffragan bishop of Maryland, Heather Cook, who is currently awaiting trial for killing a Baltimore cyclist whom she struck while driving her car in an intoxicated state, the committee was tasked with offering practical recommendations on addressing drug and alcohol abuse within the church, as well as initiating a process of discussion of the “hidden problem” of addiction that affected many Episcopalians.

The Episcopal Church “must act decisively on matters of alcohol and drug abuse,” Bishop Hollingsworth (pictured) said, thanking the presiding bishop for chartering the committee, whose members he said represented the experience and wisdom of“hundreds of years of sobriety and recovery.”

In discussion of the resolutions in the House of Deputies the previous day, the Episcopal New Services quoted Easton Deputy, the Rev Kevin Cross as saying the church’s image in popular culture was not healthy. “We have lived too much into the jokes of ‘where there are four Episcopalians, there is a fifth’ and ‘we are whiskey-palians’: we must redefine the norm,”