THE FIRST DOMINO
If Rowan Williams allows Mrs. Schori into the next Primates Meeting, Ian Ernest has made other plans for that week:
Primates from the Global South are contemplating a boycott of the next Primates’ Meeting because the US Presiding Bishop, Dr Katharine Jefferts Schori, will be present.
The Archbishop of the Indian Ocean, the Most Revd Ian Ernest, has confirmed that he will not attend the meeting, due to take place in Dublin, 25-31 January.
Archbishop Ernest said last week that he had written to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the summer to convey his distress at the election in the United States of the Rt Revd Mary Glasspool, a partnered lesbian, as Bishop of Los Angeles. He had urged Dr Williams to exclude Dr Jefferts Schori from future Primates’ Meet ings.
“There were conditions attached in that letter,” he said last week, “and I can confirm I will not attend if those conditions are not fulfilled.”
Kate’ll be there of course.
Dr Jefferts Schori has already con firmed that she will attend the meeting.
In what is perhaps a bit of a surprise, David Anderson of the American Anglican Council opposes a boycott. The primates, he thinks, need to show up, confront Dr. Williams and finally deal with the US/Canada issue once and for all.
They are being encouraged to attend by, among others, the presid ent of the American Anglican Council, the Rt Revd David Anderson, a suffragan bishop within the Con vocation of Anglicans in North America, who has posted a letter on a website urging traditionalist bishops to go to the meeting.
In a bizarre suggestion, he advises that Dr Jefferts Schori be shut out of the room, or removed “by force of numbers” if she attends. If Dr Williams objects to this, the meeting could go ahead in a separate room without him.
A Grand GestureTM, in other words. Who didn’t see that coming?
“If asked my opinion, I would strongly advise the orthodox Prim ates to: 1) organise before the Primates’ Meeting; and 2) attend and remove by force of numbers the Pre sid ing Bishop of the American Epis copal Church (not physically, but by either voting her off the ‘island’, or reces sing to another room and not letting her in).
Not to put too fine a point on it but Mrs. Schori and Mr. Hiltz aren’t the only primates who need to be voted out of that room.
“In the above case, if Dr Williams did not go along with Jefferts Schori’s exclusion, then I would suggest having the next-door meeting with out him. I just don’t believe staying home from the field of battle helps win a war over the truth and nature of Christianity within Anglicanism.”
On one level, I agree with Bishop Anderson. If traditionalist Anglicanism wants to avoid melting into irrelevance, some kind of Grand GestureTM is necessary, maybe, at this point, even mandatory. But there’s this phrase that keeps popping into my head.
The 2008 Lambeth Conference.
The Lambeth Conference is single most important meeting in the Anglican tradition, the closest thing Anglicans have to a church council. A confrontation over the status of the US and Canada should have happened at Lambeth two years ago. But nothing happened.
The traditionalist position would have been much stronger since both traditionalist primates and bishops were there. Dr. Williams should have been informed at the start of the meeting that his Real African Word nonsense would have to wait until the problems of the US and Canada were finally dealt with.
If my gracious lord of Canterbury refused, pleaded polity or otherwise kicked the can down the road some more, a walkout should have occurred right then and there with the whole world watching. The fact that it didn’t occur right then and there strongly suggests that the primates don’t have the stones or the interest to ever bring off a direct confrontation.
Since they’ve painted themselves into a corner, boycotting the Primates Meeting is a good a move as traditionalist primates have right now. If they decide to go through with it and have a meeting of their own, that meeting had better take place in Dublin at exactly the same time as the Primates Meeting.
Because if they don’t, no one will know about it. Will they? Who knows? I’ve given up expecting very much from Anglican bishops and archbishops. Body of work, as they say.
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