Anglican Bishops Meet in Canterbury

From The New York Times

By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: July 21, 2008

CANTERBURY, England — As he passed through the heavy wooden doors of this city’s ancient cathedral behind a procession of 650 other Anglican bishops and archbishops on Sunday, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, appeared taut and ill at ease. It was as if keeping a church with an estimated 80 million followers around the world from breaking apart over the issue of gay priests and bishops was proving almost too heavy a burden.

Gene Robinson, a gay New Hampshire bishop who was not invited to Lambeth, waving at an open-air Eucharist nearby.

In a whipping wind that caught the tail of his golden-threaded miter, Archbishop Williams, as he entered the cathedral, was crossing a threshold in Anglican history. From a stone seat close by the spot where a 12th-century archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas à Becket, was murdered by Norman knights seeking to end the archbishop’s defiance of King Henry II, Archbishop Williams led a Eucharist marking the formal opening of a gathering that many in the church have described as a make-or-break moment.

The gathering, the Lambeth Conference, takes place once every 10 years. This year’s meeting, centered on two weeks of debate that begin Monday, is taking place only a few weeks after a group of bishops from the church’s traditionalist and evangelical wings, meeting in Jerusalem, founded a new group, the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, that many in the church regard as posing the gravest threat of a schism in the worldwide Anglican Communion since Anglicanism was born in King Henry VIII’s 16th-century break with Rome.

The group in Jerusalem claimed to have the allegiance of 300 Anglican bishops and archbishops, many from Africa, and vowed to step up its battle with church liberals, especially in the United States, over the issue of gay priests that has nearly paralyzed the Communion in recent years. Equally threatening to the continued existence of a unified Communion, the new group challenged the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury to speak for Anglicans worldwide, and followed up the Jerusalem gathering by effectively boycotting the Lambeth meeting.

At the procession on Sunday, the extent of the boycott was clear, with at least 220 absentees among the 880 bishops and archbishops invited. Equally stark was the absence of the bishop who more than any other has come to embody all that traditionalists and evangelicals abhor in the church’s liberal wing: Gene Robinson, the Episcopalian bishop of New Hampshire. In 2003, he became the first openly declared gay priest to become an Anglican bishop, touching off the bitter dispute that culminated in the meeting in Jerusalem in June.

Archbishop Williams, seeking to avoid open confrontation between liberals and traditionalists at Lambeth, withheld an invitation from Bishop Robinson. That put the American in a small group of Anglican bishops denied a place at the Canterbury meeting and, incongruously, on a list of unwanted people that includes a Nolbert Kunonga, a disgraced prelate who was ousted last year from his position as bishop of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, because of his unwavering support for President Robert Mugabe during the country’s slide into chronic poverty and violence.

Despite the snub to Bishop Robinson, a large group of American bishops, including Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, are attending. So, too, in his way, is Bishop Robinson, who has attracted widespread attention in the news media here since arriving in Britain 10 days ago. On Sunday, he attended an “alternative” open-air Eucharist that gay and lesbian groups held in St. Stephen’s Park, in a leafy residential area of Canterbury with a view across the city to the cathedral spires.

About 200 worshipers, including many of the American bishops who attended the earlier Eucharist at the cathedral, held a service before a roughly carpentered wooden cross, then lingered over a picnic. Bishop Robinson, surrounded by well-wishers, declined to give interviews, apparently keen to let only his presence speak. In a radio interview with the BBC last week, he said he had not come to England to disrupt the Lambeth Conference but rather to make the case for gay men and lesbians in the clergy in as civil a manner as possible.

“Let’s be clear,” he said. “I am not planning to storm into the pulpit to take the microphone away from the archbishop. I’m not trying to attend meetings to which I am not invited.”

The Rev. Susan Russell, an Episcopalian minister from Pasadena, Calif., who is president of Integrity USA, a gay and lesbian group that was an organizer of the park gathering, said Archbishop Williams’s decision to exclude Bishop Robinson “grieves the heart of God.”

If Archbishop Williams’s reasoning was that allowing him to attend would have led to a boycott by Anglican traditionalists and evangelicals, she said, that too was a misjudgment, as hard-liners opposed to ordaining gay clerics had stayed away anyway. “That sort of demonstrates that there is a fringe of determined conservatives for whom no compromise is sufficient,” she said.

Traditionalists have also objected to the ordination of women as priests and bishops, and on this, too, the American lead has been showcased at the conference. In the Sunday morning procession, fewer than 20 of the 650 bishops were women, and more than half of those were Americans, including Bishop Jefferts Schori, of Boston. She entered the cathedral in the procession’s final group, which included Archbishop Williams. Female bishops from Australia, Argentina, Canada and Cuba also joined the procession.

While American liberals and African conservatives have been at the heart of the contest over gay and women in the clergy, conference officials noted the presence of many African bishops, one of the largest groups in Sunday’s procession. In Africa, they said, only The Church of the Province of Uganda had imposed a blanket boycott on bishops attending the conference, and other bishops from countries where traditionalists hold sway had braved their superiors’ disapproval to attend.

One African delegate, Bishop Thomas Dibo from Cameroon, implied he was not with the conservatives. “It’s God’s communion, and we’re all children from the same womb,” he said.

At the last Lambeth Conference, in 1998, the first steps toward the current bitterness were taken when delegates passed resolutions condemning homosexuality and forbidding the ordination of homosexuals. That set the stage for battle, especially when Archbishop Robinson, with an acknowledged male partner, was consecrated by the American church in 2003.

This year’s conference will hold no formal plenary debates, and will vote on no resolutions. Working with a “design team” that included at least one representative from the American church, the Rev. Ian T. Douglas from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., Archbishop Williams devised a format that allotted three days, beginning last week, for the bishops to go into retreat at the cathedral, meeting in small groups to discuss, pray and listen to five sermons by Archbishop Williams. To limit the risks of discord, conference organizers say they have asked the bishops to take “appropriate care” in anything they say to reporters. In the second week, the bishops move into larger sessions to deal directly with the issue of gay and female clerics, in a session titled “Human Sexuality and the Witness of Scripture.”

The arrangements have led to criticism of Archbishop Williams from liberals and conservatives, who say his “stealth” approach to the most sensitive issues will do nothing to resolve them. The criticism has built on a frequent critique of the straggly-bearded Archbishop Williams, 58, as an other-worldly, Oxford-educated theologian who lacks the political skills, and perhaps the power of personality, to force compromise. His supporters say the divide is so wide that he has little choice but to play for time, and hope that Christian values of tolerance and understanding will foster a spirit of compromise.

Dr. Phillip Aspinall, the Anglican primate of Australia, acting as chief spokesman for the conference, offered a weary prognosis after Sunday’s Eucharist of what the talking might achieve. “The last Lambeth Conference didn’t resolve our differences, the one before that didn’t resolve them, and this one won’t, either,” he said. “That’s the journey of life, until the Lord returns, I’m afraid.”