This message from Bishop George Connor regarding
final honors for Bishop (Army General) Albion Knight who has been a staunch
defender of the Faith and of his country:
Dear Friends,
Bishop and Brigadier General Albion W. Knight, Jr.
will be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery today at 2 PM EDT. Mrs.
Nancy Knight wrote the following to me:
It will be "a small graveside service. He
refused Highest Honors, saying it was too hot for all those soldiers, horses,
and brass band. That's my Al!"
He will be sorely missed by the Church and by our
Nation.
+Jerry L. Ogles, DD
Albion W. Knight Jr., 87, a retired Army brigadier
general and nuclear weapons adviser who was the 1992 vice presidential candidate
for the conservative US Taxpayers Party and served as a bishop in the United
Episcopal Church, died May 22 at his home in Gaithersburg. He had congestive
heart failure.
Bishop Knight was born in Jacksonville, Florida and
graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1945 and in 1950 received a
master’s degree in communications engineering from the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. He received a master’s degree in international affairs
from American University in 1977.
He spent much of his early life in the Episcopal
Church, in which he was an ordained deacon and priest.
He spent more than a year in Vietnam as deputy
commanding general of a signal brigade and deputy chief of staff for logistics,
directing the drawdown of 125,000 troops.
In the late 1960s, he was assigned to the Atomic
Energy Commission, where he was an assistant director of a research and
development division. He was deputy commanding general of the Army Electronics
Command at Fort Monmouth, NJ, in 1970 and 1971.
Gen. Knight’s final active-duty assignment, in 1973,
was assistant chief of staff for logistics with Allied Forces Central Europe;
he was based in the Netherlands.
After his military retirement, he served three years
with the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, a congressional committee in which
he held a supervisory role over the Atomic Energy Commission’s weapons budget.
From 1977 to 1983, he was a self-employed management consultant.
His military decorations included the Distinguished
Service Medal and the Legion of Merit.
He joined the United Episcopal Church of North
America, in the early 1980s and served as the church’s presiding bishop from
1989 until his resignation in 1992. As the Presiding Bishop of the UECNA,
Knight more than tripled the number of parishes belonging to the church,
oversaw the establishment of the church's seminary, and negotiated an
intercommunion agreement with the Anglican Catholic Church. He later helped
found the Church of England (Continuing), a conservative church in England that
opposes both the growth of Anglo-Catholic practices and doctrines within the
Church of England and the more liberal religious and social stance of the
Church of England..
In 1992, he was the presidential running mate of
conservative activist Howard Phillips for the U.S. Taxpayers Party, which among
other things advocated drastic reductions in spending, eliminating the income
tax and withdrawing from the United Nations. They garnered more than 40,000
votes nationally.
His first wife, Lucile Stice Knight, whom he married
in 1949, died in 1969. A son from his first marriage, Kenneth Knight, died in
1995. A stepson, Richard Price, died in 1984.
Survivors include his wife of 41
years, Nancy Price Knight of Gaithersburg; a daughter from his first marriage,
Nancy Lammie of Silver Spring; two stepchildren, Brian Gill-Price of Langhorne,
Pa., and Darcy Smith of Jacksonville; two sisters; nine grandchildren; and 10
great-grandchildren.
