Conservative bishops deliver blow to Anglican Covenant
Conservative Anglicans have rejected a proposed landmark agreement designed to prevent splits in the worldwide Anglican Communion, just as the Church of England — the Communion’s mother church — moved a step closer to adopting it.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the 80 million Anglicans worldwide, has invested much personal authority in the proposed Anglican Covenant, which aims to prevent disputes over divisive issues such as gay bishops and same-sex unions. He has said the Anglican Communion faced a “piece-by-piece dissolution” if member churches failed to undertake to avoid actions that upset others.
The General Synod, the Church of England’s governing body, voted in favour of the deal, although it still has a number of stages to go before adoption, which would be no earlier than 2012.
But the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) Primates’ Council, a group largely led by African church leaders, on Wednesday rejected the proposed Covenant, which would require member churches to settle disputes through discussion.
“While we acknowledge that the efforts to heal our brokenness through the introduction of an Anglican Covenant were well intentioned we have come to the conclusion the current text is fatally flawed and so support for this initiative is no longer appropriate,” the council said in a statement.
The covenant was first proposed in 2004 following tensions over the consecration of an openly gay bishop at the Episcopal Church, the official U.S. member of the Communion. Those Anglicans who supported the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson fear the covenant would impede similar acts in future.
First group of Anglican bishops to convert to Rome
Five Church of England bishops opposed to the ordination of women bishops will take up an offer by Pope Benedict and convert to Roman Catholicism, heralding a possible exodus of traditionalist Anglicans.
The bishops will enter full communion with Rome through an ordinariate, a body proposed by the pope last October to let traditionalists convert while keeping some Anglican traditions, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales announced.
The ordinariate will let married clerics become Catholic priests, in an exception to the Vatican’s celibacy rule, but not bishops. Married Anglican bishops who convert may be granted a special status almost equivalent to their former rank.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion, accepted the resignations of two bishops directly under his authority, Andrew Burnham and Keith Newton, “with regret.” He wished them well “in this next stage of their service to the Church.”
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference said in a statement: “We welcome the decision of Bishops Andrew Burnham, Keith Newton, John Broadhurst, Edwin Barnes and David Silk to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church through the Ordinariate for England and Wales, which will be established under the provisions of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus.
“At our plenary meeting next week, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales will be exploring the establishment of the Ordinariate and the warm welcome we will be extending to those who seek to be part of it. Further information will be made known after the meeting.”
Excerpts from Pope Benedict’s address at Lambeth Palace
Meeting Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, Pope Benedict put aside differences between the two churches and stressed the close cooperation they have developed over the past four decades.
Here are excerpts from the pope’s comments to the archbishop:
“…It is not my intention today to speak of the difficulties that the ecumenical path has encountered and continues to encounter. Those difficulties are well known to everyone here. Rather, I wish to join you in giving thanks for the deep friendship that has grown between us and for the remarkable progress that has been made in so many areas of dialogue during the forty years that have elapsed since the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission began its work. Let us entrust the fruits of that work to the Lord of the harvest, confident that he will bless our friendship with further significant growth.
“The context in which dialogue takes place between the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church has evolved in dramatic ways since the private meeting between Pope John XXIII and Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher in 1960. On the one hand, the surrounding culture is growing ever more distant from its Christian roots, despite a deep and widespread hunger for spiritual nourishment. On the other hand, the increasingly multicultural dimension of society, particularly marked in this country, brings with it the opportunity to encounter other religions. For us Christians this opens up the possibility of exploring, together with members of other religious traditions, ways of bearing witness to the transcendent dimension of the human person and the universal call to holiness, leading to the practice of virtue in our personal and social lives. Ecumenical cooperation in this task remains essential, and will surely bear fruit in promoting peace and harmony in a world that so often seems at risk of fragmentation.
“At the same time, we Christians must never hesitate to proclaim our faith in the uniqueness of the salvation won for us by Christ, and to explore together a deeper understanding of the means he has placed at our disposal for attaining that salvation…
“In the figure of John Henry Newman, who is to be beatified on Sunday, we celebrate a churchman whose ecclesial vision was nurtured by his Anglican background and matured during his many years of ordained ministry in the Church of England. He can teach us the virtues that ecumenism demands: on the one hand, he was moved to follow his conscience, even at great personal cost; and on the other hand, the warmth of his continued friendship with his former colleagues, led him to explore with them, in a truly eirenical spirit, the questions on which they differed, driven by a deep longing for unity in faith. Your Grace, in that same spirit of friendship, let us renew our determination to pursue the goal of unity in faith, hope, and love, in accordance with the will of our one Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”
Latest Anglican bid to mediate gay dispute meets with skepticism
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s latest proposal to mediate a gay rights dispute splitting the worldwide Anglican Communion seems to be falling on deaf ears in the opposing camps he is trying to discipline. Archbishop Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the world’s 80 million Anglicans, suggested last week that member churches approving gay bishops and same-sex unions and those actively opposing them be sidelined from official doctrinal committees.
The initiative was sparked by the consecration of an openly lesbian bishop in California last month. Williams also said conservative churches — mostly in Africa — that appoint bishops to serve in other countries would also be sidelined.
The proposal, if accepted in the Communion, would be the first time such sanctions would be imposed on dissident national churches. Unlike Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism is a federation of churches whose head has no direct power over all members.
A group campaigning for homosexual rights in the Communion said the threatened discipline caused it little worry because the committees the dissenters could not work on were “trivial.”
“These are delaying tactics, sops to the conservatives, which in reality gives them nothing,” Colin Coward, director of Changing Attitude, UK, told Reuters.
UPDATE: Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has issued a pastoral letter that refers to Williams’s proposal with a call for continued dialogue with those who disagree “for we believe that the Spirit is always calling us to greater understanding.” See Episcopal Life Online.
Church of England stops short of links with breakaway U.S. Anglicans
The Church of England stopped short of recognising a new conservative church in North America on Wednesday, avoiding possible embarrassment for the main Anglican church in the United States.
But some evangelicals in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) said they were encouraged by the decision of the General Synod, the CoE’s parliament, for the archbishops of Canterbury and York to report back on the break-away church’s progress next year.
Some members of ACNA, formed in opposition to pro-gay members of the official Anglican body in North America, said they had not expected any kind of recognition from the Anglican mother church for another five years.
“We are hopeful on this,” Kevin Kallsen, an ACNA member from Connecticut, told Reuters.
The synod voted to “recognise and affirm” the desire of those who have formed ACNA to remain within the Anglican family, amending a private member’s motion brought by Canadian-born CoE lay member Lorna Ashworth.
She had called for the synod to “express the desire” that the CoE be in communion with ACNA, saying its members had been unfairly treated for maintaining the Anglican faith in doctrine, practice and worship as they saw it while opposed to those who have embraced “erroneous teaching”.
ACNA, which includes both evangelical and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans in the United States and Canada, was founded in June 2009 after breaking ranks with the Episcopoal Church (TEC) over the issues of gay and women clergy.
Church of England at loggerheads over women bishops
The Church of England said on Monday it would go ahead with installing women as bishops, but a delay in draft legislation has left liberals and traditionalists alike uncertain about how the plan will work in practice.
Together with homosexual bishops and same-sex marriages, the ordination of women is among the most divisive issues facing the Anglican Communion, which has 77 million members worldwide.
Church leaders at the General Synod, or parliament, were due to discuss women bishops at a week-long meeting in London this week, but the Revision Committee, assigned to draft legislation, failed to meet the deadline.
The committee, which is struggling to accommodate liberals who demand equality and traditionalists who want to keep an all-male senior clergy, will present draft proposals in time for the next Synod in July, in York, northern England.
Read the whole post here.
GUESTVIEW: No king, no bishop? American Anglicans revolt
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Elizabeth E. Evans is a U.S. freelance journalist living in Glenmoore, PA who writes about religion.
By Elizabeth E. Evans
After King George III lowered the boom on Boston in the wake of the 1773 Tea Party rebellion, Virginian Theodore Bland wrote: “The question is, whether the rights and liberties of America shall be contended for, or given up to arbitrary powers.” It didn’t take long at all for J. Jon Bruno, Episcopal bishop of the diocese of Los Angeles, to launch another, quintessentially American challenge towards Canterbury and other Anglican points anxious or angry about the election of the denomination’s first openly lesbian bishop on December 5.
“I would remind the Episcopal Church and the House of Bishops they need to be conscientious about respecting the canons of the church and the baptismal covenant to respect the dignity of every human being,” Bruno said. “To not consent in this country out of fear of the reaction elsewhere in the Anglican Communion is to capitulate to titular heads.”
Within a day, Archbishop Rowan Williams responded to the election of Mary Glasspool as suffragan (assistant) bishop, warning that it raised “very serious questions” not just about the role the Episcopal Church would play in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole.
Maybe he doesn’t realize that, in the eyes of some Americans, he is virtually irrelevant.
Within the next five months or so, it will be clear whether or not the American church heeds that caution when bishops, clergy and lay leaders in the denomination’s 109 dioceses consider whether or not to approve Glasspool’s consecration as bishop. I asked Jim Naughton, editor of the online Episcopal Café and a “go-to” spokesperson for denominational liberals, if he saw anything characterologically American about the denomination’s moves to open all orders of ministry to gays and lesbians in the teeth of internal and external opposition.
Searching for clues from the Roman Catholic-Anglican summit
There wasn’t much information in the official communique after Pope Benedict and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams met at the Vatican on Saturday. The terse text mentioned “cordial discussions” about challenges facing Christians, the need to cooperate and their intention to continue bilateral theological dialogue. The only reference to the issue of the day, Benedict’s offer to take alienated Anglicans into the Catholic Church, was mentioned in passing as “recent events affecting relations between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.” Hmm, pretty thin pickings…. The Pravda-like opaqueness of the communique (read it here) prompted me to zoom in on the photographs we got from the Vatican daily L’Osservatore Romano for any other clues there. Let’s see if they help as we go along. The “pope’s paper” (here in PDF) published the communique at the bottom of its front page, below two articles on the pope’s meeting with artists and one on Iran’s nuclear program. An interesting hint at the Vatican’s priorities that day.
Given this thin statement, our news story led off: “The archbishop of Canterbury and Pope Benedict agreed the need for closer ties between their churches on Saturday, in their first meeting since last month’s surprise Vatican offer to disaffected Anglicans.” Read the whole story here.
Williams later spoke to the BBC (starting at 33:19) and Vatican Radio. He told the BBC that the meeting “went as well as I could have hoped, really.” He said he expressed Anglican concerns at the way the pope’s offer — officially called an “apostolic constitution” — was handled and the two then looked ahead to future ecumenical discussions.
On Vatican Radio, he said at the start of the interview: “Clearly, many Anglicans, myself included, felt that he put us in an awkward position for a time. Not the content so much as some of the messages that were given out. So I needed to share with the pope some of those concerns andI think those were expressed and heard in a very friendly spirit.” The pope’s main message to him, Williams said, was “that the constitution did not express any change in the Vatican’s attitude towards the Anglican Communion as such.”
This diologue between the Roman Church and the Angican is very interesting. Does it have anything to do with the real Christ and His Body, the Church?It was my privilege to have the time to research some of the fundamental beliefs of the Roman Church and compare them to what God has revealed in His Owners Manual, the Bible. It was so intriguing that I wrote a book about it: Escape From Paganism. You can review it at http://www.escapefrompaganism.comLarry Ball
Global South Anglican bishops politely decline pope’s offer
Conservative bishops who say they represent almost half the world’s Anglicans urged fellow believers on Sunday to reform the Anglican Communion rather than take up Pope Benedict’s invitation to join the Roman Catholic Church.
The “Global South” group, which last year seemed close to quitting the Communion, said those opposed to gay clergy and other liberal reforms should “stand firm with us in cherishing the Anglican heritage (and) pursuing a common vocation.”
Indirectly declining the pope’s offer to receive alienated Anglicans, the group called on the Communion’s member churches to adopt a “covenant” to coordinate policy in the loosely structured 77-million-strong worldwide Anglican community.
“The proposed Anglican Covenant … gives Anglican churches worldwide a clear and principled way forward in pursuing God’s divine purposes together,” said the statement posted on their website. Conservatives see this plan as a way to block liberal reforms in the United States, Canada and Britain.
A call to convert to Catholicism by bishops in developing countries, where the faith is expanding, could have dealt a body blow to the Anglican church, founded when King Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534 to divorce one wife and marry another.
Read the full story here.
Read also our earlier blog posts on this story:
What a tremendous blow to Vatican policy! There is no doubt that Rome hoped for a large segment of African Anglicanism (which is mostly conservative) to come in from the cold. The fact that this did not happen is a testament to the still-vital character of Anglicanism on the African continent.
Now the rest of the Anglican world–that is another matter entirely. We shall soon see what kind of numbers take the plunge.
Vatican-Anglican: where in the details will the devil be hiding?
If “the devil is in the details” when two groups seek a merger, where will he be hiding when the Vatican talks with disaffected Anglicans who want to join the Roman church? Neither the agenda nor the schedule for these talks are clear, but some issues are starting to emerge as possible hurdles to a smooth switchover for Anglicans who want to “swim the Tiber.”
There is little clarity yet on either side. The Vatican has not spelled out the conditions of the “Apostolic Constitution” to accept Anglicans who want to join Catholicism while maintaining some of their own traditions. Additionally, there are varied faces of Anglicanism, which in its dogmas and practices stands somewhere between Roman Catholicism and Protestant traditions such as the Lutheran or Reformed churches. This will clearly take a while to work out.
The spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, played down any problems when the offer was announced. But several reactions from Anglicans to Tuesday’s announcement, including from some inclined to make the switch, have begun to trace the outlines of the looming doctrinal debates among Anglicans worldwide and between the Vatican and Anglicans knocking at its door.
Bishop Donald Harvey, moderator of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC), posted a succinct summary of sticky issues on his group’s website. This group of about 3,500 regular churchgoers is a diocese of the breakaway conservative Anglican Church in North America, which claims over 100,000 members across the continent. Harvey asked:
1. “Will the Roman Catholic Church require Anglican priests who choose this option to be re-ordained?
(NB: The Vatican has traditionally said that Anglican ordinations are not valid.)
2. “Will people who accept this invitation have to subscribe to Roman Catholic dogmas to which the Anglican Formularies are diametrically opposed – such as “Papal Infallibility”, the “Immaculate Conception” and Transubstantiation?
(NB: Papal infallibility says the pope cannot err when he rules on matters of faith and morals. The Catholic belief that the Virgin Mary was born without Original Sin is not a dogma in Anglicanism, although some Anglo-Catholics believe it. The Catholic dogma of transubstantiation says bread and wine actually become the flesh and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist, while Anglicans believe this transformation is only symbolic.)
3. “Will Anglican priests – especially married ones – choosing to accept the Roman Catholic Church’s invitation have equal status with existing Roman Catholic clergy and will their ministry be interchangeable and welcomed in Roman Catholic parishes?”
In his statement, Harvey brought up another issue that could lead to disagreement — the meaning of the word “catholic.” Anglicans say they are a part of an undivided catholic (i.e. universal) Church, while Rome says it represents the true Church and churches that split off at the Reformation are not churches in the true sense. Pope Benedict has been quite clear on this point, most notably in his 2000 doctrinal document Dominus Iesus. Harvey quoted an ANiC priest as saying: “As for me and my house, we will remain ever faithful to the authority and primacy of the Holy Scriptures and the Faith and Order of the undivided Catholic Church. I need not become a Roman Catholic to be a Catholic Christian. As an Anglican, I am a Catholic Christian.”
Bishop Jack Iker, head of the Episcopal (U.S. Anglican) diocese of Forth Worth, Texas, touched on the same issue in his reaction: “Not all Anglo-Catholics can accept certain teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, nor do they believe that they must first convert to Rome in order to be truly catholic Christians.”
What kind of idiot would reject a church because it ordains women in order to join one that brutalizes and buggers children?
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