Lambeth Diary: Anglican 'Holy Office'

From Ruth Gledhill, The Times (UK) Religion Writer:

The Anglican Communion is on the rack and the torture continues. It surely cannot be stretched much longer before it is torn apart.

The second observations document of the Windsor Continuation Group has just dropped. It gives more detail of the Principles of Canon Law Project, which we wrote about earlier and which is being talked of by primates as the 'Fifth Instrument of Communion'. I am told it will not be so much a Catholic-style 'Code of Canon Law' as a 'blueprint' of Canon Law. However, comparisons with the Roman Church will become even more inevitable because of another plan, to set up a new Faith and Order Commission.

This sounds extraordinarily like the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The WCG observations document says it will 'give guidance on the ecclesiological issues raised by our current crisis.' The CDF was of course formerly the Holy Office, or the Inquisition.

So what does this mean?

It means that the people in charge of this process have at last realised, perhaps thanks to Gafcon, that the African provinces who are boycotting Lambeth are serious. There is a desperation to keep them on board to prevent the Church from splitting.

If this new Commission enforces the new canon law blueprint in a way that is strictly in line with Lambeth 1.10, it also means there will be huge anger in the US. The Episcopal Church could well find itself riven by a formal split, leaving questions over which will be recognised by Canterbury. (Maybe those behind the name change from the former PECUSA saw this coming and that was a preparatory step.)

But we are fools if we think just the US will be affected. There are many traditionalist, catholic parishes in the Church of England that might well prefer to be aligned with a liberal TEC than a strictly conservative evangelical province.

The key to this in the UK will be where the moderate conservatives go. The extreme end of Gafcon, it is accepted, might already be lost. But will the Bishop of Durham Tom Wright, the respectable and intellectual face of orthodoxy, and others of his ilk, who are disliked by the far right, go with this? Gary Lillibridge, Bishop of West Texas, is a member of the Windsor Contination Group and is a highly-respected conservative bishop, in similar mould to Dr Wright.

My sources tell me the moderate conservatives are on side with this. One of the battles being fought, apparently, is over which way the TEC Primate Katharine Jefferts Schori will jump. The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams is desperate to have her on side, and on that hangs or falls the unity of the Anglican Communion. What will she do?

If she breaks ranks, the split would go international.

Apparently the third WCG document, to come out next week, contains a 'bombshell'. Maybe then we'll find out out more. Or maybe that will be the bomb that finally blows the whole thing into smithereens. We've just had a chance to ask Bishop Clive Handford, former Jerusalem Primate who chairs the Windsor Continuation Group, what the bombshell might be. He said: 'We'll have to see. Some may hear something ticking. I do not know.' All will be revealed on Monday.

Jim Naughton at The Lead also has the story and supports my interpretation. He's just told me: 'It's troubling, but perhaps unsurprising to see a group composed almost exclusively of bishops, and advised by Anglican Communion Office bureaucrats recommending new structures for the Communion that strengthen the role of bishops and bureaucrats at the expense of clergy and lay people.'