CIRCLING THE DRAIN

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

This year, the Anglican Communion is 142 years old so it would not be a tragedy if the Communion went out of business soon. And the Anglican Communion is pretty close to going out of business:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has rejected Africa’s call to suspend the Dublin primates meeting, a spokesman for Dr. Rowan Williams’ tells The Church of England Newspaper, and the meeting will go on as scheduled.

On Nov 17 Lambeth Palace confirmed that Dr. Williams had received a letter from CAPA chairman Archbishop Ian Earnest. This letter raised a “concern about the planning process for the Primates’ Meeting and request[ed] that it be postponed.”

“However, given the closeness of the time, and the fact that the majority of Primates have already indicated that they will attend, the Archbishop of Canterbury is not minded to postpone the meeting whose date was set two years ago,” the Lambeth Palace statement said.

Dr. Williams’ decision not to postpone the Dublin meeting, will likely cause a quarter to a third of the primates to stay away, replicating the divisions surrounding the 2008 Lambeth Conference where a majority of African bishops boycotted the meeting.

The spokesman added that Dr. Williams was “pleased to note that Archbishop Earnest expresses on behalf of the CAPA Primates that there is no desire to exclude anyone from the meeting and the Archbishop of Canterbury is anxious that all Communion Primates and Moderators recognise the importance of this event.”

A disconnect between Dr. Williams and the CAPA primates may be present, however, as the CAPA primates told Dr. Williams on Aug 24 during the All African Bishops Conference in Entebbe that if US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and Archbishop Fred Hiltz were there, they would not come. This view was reiterated in the Nov 9 letter, sources note.

What will happen if these primates skip the meeting? I suspect not much. Mr. Hiltz and Mrs. Schori will claim vindication. The Archbishop of Canterbury will continue to pretend that people still care what he thinks and that nothing is wrong. Some sort of meeting or other of conservative bishops and primates will be scheduled. And Anglicanism will continue the same intellectual and theological incoherence that has characterized it pretty much since its beginning.

In other words, same old same old.