Schism looms over the Anglican Communion – but it isn’t going to happen
by Gavin Ashenden, Catholic Herald:
From last week, the Anglican Communion exists in two different realities, or perhaps two different dimensions.
It may be not unlike the difference between the empirical world of Newtonian physics where the rules are solidly in place and determine what happens, and a form of “quantum ecclesial world” where cause and effect are more random and follow different dynamics.
A number of the Anglican Primates, representing something like 80 per cent of the Anglican membership worldwide met together in Kigali, Rwanda, to respond to the Church of England’s General Synod legitimising the blessing of homosexual partnerships.
In response, after many speeches of lament and theological outrage, they decided to draft a letter of protest to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
However, Justin Welby has been playing a slow and careful game of brinkmanship with the conservative majority of his Communion for a long time. Indeed, he inherited this strategy from his predecessor.
The bureaucracy at Lambeth Palace remains in control of the instructional levers of the Anglican Communion, and the opposition is reduced to writing postcards or protest from abroad, with little actual effect.
Welby has been as careful as he can not to give his opponents in the Anglican Communion, or indeed at home, the red line of changing the doctrine of marriage. And so, in a tactic that may be replicated elsewhere, he has been content to simply change pastoral practice.
He continues to insist that this change of authorised prayers, (which while voluntary places a target on the back of every Anglican minister who declines to offer the service) has not changed the doctrine of the Church of England.
His conservative critics across the Anglican Communion, knowing the rules of the game, have been trying to agree on some other a red line they can respond to which, if and when crossed, would allow them to remove the Archbishop of Canterbury from his position as “primes inter pares” of the Anglican Communion.
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