Return To Lay Status
Early in 2010, Osborne petitioned the Patriarchate of Constantinople for a return to lay status "to enable him to have a family home with the possibility of marrying again". This petiton was granted, although the precise terms of the decree of the Holy Synod bringing about the return to lay status have not been published. According to a report of the Moscow Patriarchate, Osborne was also defrocked.
Osborne's approach to the Ecumenical Patriarch was effected, at his request, by his ruling archbishop, Gabriel of Comana. On 20 February 2010 Archbishop Gabriel informed members of his archdiocese that the decision to "return Bishop Basil to lay status" had been made the previous week. The archbishop's letter to members of the deanery gives all the information from any Ecumenical Patriarchate source which is in the public domain about the matter.
Read more about this topic: Basil Osborne
Famous quotes containing the words return to, return, lay and/or status:
“At twelve, the disintegration of afternoon
Began, the return to phantomerei, if not
To phantoms. Till then, it had been the other way:
One imagined the violet trees but the trees stood green,
At twelve, as green as ever they would be.
The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest phrase.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 17:17,18.
Jesus, after healing ten lepers.
“The whole world of thought lay unexplored before me,—a world of which I had already caught large and tempting glimpses, and I did not like to feel the horizon shutting me in, even to so pleasant a corner as this.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)