Author Archive
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Friday, January 14th, 2011
The Dublin gathering of Primates—is it a “Primates’ Meeting” when so many are not attending?—is soon to happen. Many are the views on whether conservative Primates should attend, and the reasons pro and con equally many. We hold a range of views among ourselves, but we are unanimous in our hope that the Primates of the Global South will be united in their response.
Moreover, opinions of others are irrelevant at this point: it will be the case that a major block of the Communion will not be represented at the Meeting. To say it is ‘only ten’; or to argue that the Primates don’t represent their Provinces; or to say it should be more; or to question whether the Primates’ Meeting is a bona fide gathering at all – all of this simply shows how degenerated has become the very basic life of the Communion, as measured against what has been a tacit fellowship in charity and mission not all that long ago. One ought properly to conclude that just one Primate not appearing is a terrible thing.
Reasonable people may and do disagree about attendance at this meeting. Still, we are seeing a tragic development and a public scandal, which by now many have become accustomed to if they have not simply turned away.
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January 14 2011 | Articles
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Sunday, August 22nd, 2010
As we have noted several times in recent months, the final text of the Anglican Covenant assigns important tasks defined in Section 4 to a committee designated the “Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion.” There is currently no committee in the Anglican Communion bearing that title or capable of performing those tasks. The ACC standing committee was briefly referred to by the Section 4 title, but that name was not given it by the ACC. In any case in July 2010 the standing committee of the new company intended to replace the former ACC, noting objections to the title, agreed that it would be known simply as the standing committee.
Moreover, the ACC committee cannot fulfill the role defined by the Covenant, which makes the Section 4 committee “responsible to” both the Primates’ Meeting and the ACC, in the case of the latter as it was defined by its former constitution. Under the ACC’s new corporate arrangement, the members of its standing committee now comprise the entire membership and management of the ACC for legal purposes. Nor is there any meaningful way in which that committee could be said to be responsible to the Primates’ Meeting as contemplated by the Covenant.
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August 22 2010 | Articles
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Friday, August 20th, 2010
Although we have written before of our concerns over the substance of the new Articles of Association of the Anglican Consultative Council, until now we have said little about our concerns over the procedures followed by the Anglican Communion Office in managing the development of these Articles. Others voiced complaints and we remained hopeful that the ACO would respond to these complaints with transparency and by providing satisfactory answers. This has not happened.
We are dismayed that the Communion Office is either unable or unwilling to provide even the most basic information to those who have raised serious concerns: what information was provided to the provinces; when was it provided; and what was their response. An amendment of the constitution is a significant action by an organization, especially one subject to legal duties. Maintaining this information is the most basic level of diligence required of an organization’s secretariat. The lack of transparency and public accountability throughout this process is one of the most regrettable episodes of Communion life in recent years.
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August 20 2010 | Articles
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Thursday, August 12th, 2010
Yesterday the Anglican Communion News Service published an interview with Canon John Rees, legal advisor to the Anglican Consultative Council, that responded in part to questions we previously raised in our paper, “Contrasting Futures for the Anglican Communion: A Transformed ACC and the Anglican Covenant.” We are grateful to the Anglican Communion Office, Canon Rees and the ACNS for responding directly on this matter of wide interest and for their renewed commitment to transparency in the process of structural reform now underway in the Communion. We continue to believe that these changes raise significant questions, that many of these questions remain unanswered, and that these questions should be considered throughout the Anglican Communion. We emphasize that the questions we raise below are not posed to Canon Rees alone, but are addressed more broadly to all those interested in the future of the Communion.
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August 12 2010 | Articles
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
The crises in the Anglican Communion in recent years have revealed two distinct problems confronting the Communion, one theological and one structural. The two halves of faith and order. The theological problem is whether the Communion has theological coherence on major questions of faith and practice. Slowly over the last decade and a half an affirmative answer to this question has been evolving. In particular, on the presenting crisis of human sexuality the Communion does have a common mind that has been expressed repeatedly by all four Instruments. The extent to which this has happened is reflected in the report of the Joint Standing Committee in late 2007 after the meeting of TEC’s House of Bishops in New Orleans:
The Communion seems to be converging around a position which says that while it is inappropriate to proceed to public Rites of Blessing of same-sex unions and to the consecration of bishops who are living in sexual relationships outside of Christian marriage, we need to take seriously our ministry to gay and lesbian people inside the Church and the ending of discrimination, persecution and violence against them. Here, The Episcopal Church and the Instruments of Communion speak with one voice.
TEC’s Presiding Bishop concurred in that report, but she has since served as the chief consecrator of Mary Glasspool and TEC’s General Convention has authorized the development of liturgies for public rites of blessing.
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July 28 2010 | Articles
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Sunday, July 4th, 2010
The Reverend Canon Professor Christopher Seitz The Reverend Dr. Philip Turner The Reverend Dr. Ephraim Radner Mark McCall, Esq. We have written often about the Anglican Consultative Council and its Standing Committee over the last year. After the chaotic session in Jamaica in May 2009 we noted that the ACC had not followed its own [...]
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July 04 2010 | Articles
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Friday, June 18th, 2010
The Episcopal New Service has announced that Bishop Ian Douglas of Connecticut was elected by the Executive Council on June 18 to succeed Bishop Catherine Roskam as the episcopal representative from TEC on the Anglican Consultative Council. In addition, a presbyter, the Rev. Gay Jennings, was elected to the clerical seat on the ACC formerly held but since vacated by Bishop Douglas.
We note that until recently Bishop Douglas also held a presbyter seat on the Executive Council as well but he formally resigned that position in February in light of his anticipated consecration to the episcopate. He noted in his resignation letter that:
The reason for my resignation is my “translation” to a new order as a result of being elected to the episcopate in the Diocese of Connecticut. I thus can no longer serve as a presbyter elected by the General Convention to the Executive Council.
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June 18 2010 | Articles
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Monday, May 17th, 2010
In our last post we noted that Bishop Ian Douglas was ineligible under the rules of the Anglican Consultative Council to continue serving on the ACC and its standing committee upon his consecration to the episcopacy in April. In a blog post yesterday, Father Mark Harris, a member of TEC’s Executive Council, discloses that Bishop Douglas in fact resigned from the ACC in February and announced this to the Executive Council at its February meeting. According to Fr. Harris, (then Fr.) Douglas recognized that he would not be permitted to continue to hold his clerical seat on the ACC upon his consecration. The fact of Douglas’s resignation had not been disclosed previously and greatly simplifies the analysis of what the ACC rules require in this situation. The implications of Bishop Douglas’s consecration and his resignation are now plain.
First, from the date of his resignation in February, Bishop Douglas ceased to be a member of the ACC standing committee. Article 2(f) of the ACC bylaws provides:
Elected members of the Standing Committee shall hold office from the end of the Council meeting at which they are appointed until the end of the last ordinary Council meeting which they would be entitled to attend but subject to earlier termination in the event that such elected member shall for any reason cease to be a member of the Council. (Emphasis added.)
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May 17 2010 | Articles
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Reports this week from the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia indicate that it passed a resolution approving in principle the first three sections of the Anglican Covenant, but requesting legal advice on the “appropriateness” of Paragraph 4.2.8. The relevant clause of the resolution as passed reads as follows:
Requests the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion to obtain an opinion from the Legal Advisor to the Anglican Consultative Council and from the Chancellors and Legal Advisors Committee of this church regarding the appropriateness of the provisions of Clause 4.2.8 of the proposed Covenant in relation to decisions regarding membership of the Anglican Consultative Council….
Although this request for legal advice applies only to Paragraph 4.2.8, it is clear from the vote and the debate that the dissatisfaction in New Zealand extends to Section 4 as a whole. The resolution was authored by Dr. Tony Fitchett, who was the chairman of the resolutions committee at ACC-14 in Jamaica that drafted the resolutions on the Covenant debated at that ACC meeting. Since ACC-14, Dr. Fitchett has served on the standing committee of the Anglican Consultative Council, the body that approved the final text of the Covenant last December. Whatever Dr. Fitchett’s views of the Covenant were in December, he is now very much opposed to Section 4:
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May 13 2010 | Articles
Written by: The Anglican Communion Institute, Inc.
Sunday, April 4th, 2010
We at ACI have often written in recent years about the autonomy of dioceses within the constitutional polity of The Episcopal Church. Indeed, as we have noted elsewhere, TEC’s polity mirrors that of the Anglican Communion as a whole. That is, the churches of the Communion are autonomous in the sense that they are self-governing, but by tradition, now articulated in the Anglican Covenant, they are bound one to another by mutual subjection in the Lord. In The Episcopal Church our dioceses, by constitution, are autonomous. What we all too often have not practiced either in our internal or external relations is mutual subjection.
This is not a new problem. In his volume on TEC’s governance in “The Church’s Teaching” series, Canon Dawley, who recognized that the “independence” of the diocese and its bishop “in respect of the rest of the Church is almost complete,” went on to caution:
While there may be many good reasons for not changing the constitutional arrangements which have resulted in this diocesan independence, it must be recognized that at times it has seriously handicapped the effort of the Episcopal Church on the national level. Parochialism, or the absorption of the people of a parish with their own affairs to the exclusion of their responsibilities to the whole Church, is a common temptation every Christian community must face; there may also be an equally self-absorbing ‘diocesanism.” (p.116.)
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April 04 2010 | Articles
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