SEPPUKU

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

If the Telegraph is right, the Church of England just poured gasoline all over itself and lit a match:

An openly-homosexual cleric has been nominated to become a senior bishop, in a move that threatens to provoke a damaging split in the Church of England.

A confidential meeting, chaired by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has approved Dr Jeffrey John, the Dean of St Albans, to be on the shortlist to be the next Bishop of Southwark.

He is understood to be the favoured candidate.

Members of the Crown Nominations Commission, the body responsible for selecting bishops, will vote this week on whether Dr John’s name should now be put forward to the Prime Minister for final approval.

David Cameron has been made aware that Dr John is on the shortlist for the post and is understood to be supportive of such an appointment.

I had thought that a formal, de jure Anglican split was probably not going to happen, at least not any time soon but I might have been wrong once again. Because if this appointment goes through, everything changes.

Everything.

Assuming John gets the nod, can Rowan Williams force him to stand down a second time? Will His Grace survive if he does? Does His Grace even want to at this point?

If Jeffrey John becomes a bishop, we must confront the fact that the mother church of the Anglican Communion, the church with which all other “official” Anglican churches wish to be affiliated, has just breached one of the Windsor Report moratoria.

What then?

What sanctions should be applied against Lambeth Palace? After all, the Americans were sanctioned; why should the British be treated differently? More importantly, if sanctions are applied, who will apply them? The Archbishop of Canterbury? Shall Dr. Williams penalize his own church for taking an action that he probably supports?

Which raises two more questions. Has Rowan Williams finally arrived at the conclusion that Anglican unity cannot be salvaged so he might as well stop pretending and be who he always has been? Is Dr. Williams, in effect, telling Anglican conservatives, “Do whatever you think you have to do?”

If Jeff John gets a pointy hat and Rowan Williams doesn’t interfere, the ball is back in the Anglican conservative court. What do they do with it? One would hope that they would be intelligent enough to realize that such an action would destroy any reason to remain “officially” Anglican.

One supposes, for example, that conservative die-hards will separate the Archbishop of Canterbury from the church he heads. That is, Rowan Williams is both the head of the Church of England, with which we have no connection, and the head of the Anglican Communion, something we revere. So the fact that the Church of England consecrated an unrepentant sinner as a bishop is irrelevant.

Unfortunately, that only works if you leave a premise or two out of your syllogism. One is that if Jeffrey John gets Southwark and Rowan Williams does nothing to stop the appointment, we are left with the fact that the head of the Anglican Communion has just sanctioned a violation of the expressed will of the Anglican Communion.

Basically, if Jeffrey John becomes a bishop, all remaining conservative Anglican rationalizations are completely obliterated. Conservative Anglican primates will no longer have no reason whatsoever to maintain any connection at all with this ridiculous “tradition.” And conservative Anglican pew-sitters had better begin to ask themselves some serious questions.