Former Episcopal bishop Lipscomb now a Catholic priest

Friday, December 4, 2009
By John Barry, Times Staff Writer
John Lipscomb, the married, 59-year-old former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Southwest Florida, was ordained a Catholic priest Wednesday. The morning after, he expressed joy and a sense of relief. He's at peace, spiritually. He's just a priest now. He's not the boss. "The part of the job that never fit was sitting in judgment of other people's lives," he said. "I'm at a point in my life where I want to do the things God called me to do, and not have to make the kinds of decisions that are impossible to make anyway."

"We're happy that John has found his place," said Jim DeLa, the Episcopal Diocese's director of communications. "If this is it for him, God bless him."

Twelve years ago, Lipscomb was elevated to lead nearly 40,000 Southwest Florida Episcopalians in a ceremony that included a chorus of trumpets at the Cathedral Church of St. Peter in St. Petersburg.

Over the next decade, he fought Parkinson's disease and caught malaria on a mission to Kenya. In those same years, dissension tore his church apart. In 2003, he joined 19 bishops in a "statement of sorrow" over the naming of V. Gene Robinson as the first openly gay Episcopalian bishop...

Read the rest in St. Petersburg Times.
Hat tip to Mary Ann Mueller.