Dr. Simcox Renounces Ministry
Episcopal News Service. July 24, 1980 [80252]
Hendersonville, N.C. -- The Rev. Dr. Carroll E. Simcox, former editor of The Living Church magazine, has notified his bishop, the Rt. Rev. Charles T. Gaskell of Milwaukee, that he has renounced the ministry in the Episcopal Church, "though not the ministry of the Holy Catholic Church to which I was ordained in 1937."
In a public statement addressed to his friends in the Episcopal Church, as well as to Bishop Gaskell, Dr. Simcox said: "The position to which I have unhappily come is that I can no longer worship joyfully and serve whole-heartedly in this Church as it has become liturgically, doctrinally, and morally. I cannot believe that it is the duty, or even the right, of a Christian to remain in a church body about which, if he is honest, he must say what I have just said."
He explained that, since the 1967 General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Seattle, he had "watched the ruling powers of this Church moving away from the faith once delivered to the saints, from the doctrine and discipline of Anglican Christianity, and from that worship of God so beautifully enshrined and expressed in the Book of Common Prayer which was born in 1549 and -- for American Churchmen -- died in 1979.
"That Prayer Book was the means of my conversion to the Episcopal Church in 1934. Its supplanter is the cause of my alienation from the Episcopal Church in 1980."
Dr. Simcox retired in September, 1977, as editor of The Living Church.