Anglican Boot?

From a column in the National Post (Canada) (February 28, 2005) by Ian Hunter (author of "Fallen Tortes & Vicars: On Canada's Legal and Clerical Trials" in our March 2005 issue):

Church pronouncements - at least those from the hierarchy of the Anglican Church - are usually phrased in a gelatinous and unctuous prose that obscures meaning.  But not so the communiqué issued this week by the 35 global Primates (i.e. senior Bishops) after meeting for a week in Northern Ireland. Those sections of their final communiqué dealing with homosexuality in the church are remarkably free of ecclesiastical bafflegab. And that is bad news for the Anglican Church of Canada.

Essentially, the Bishops have given the renegade Anglican Churches in both Canada and the United States an ultimatum: shape up or get out.

The Bishops view the current North American situation as  "of the utmost seriousness", and they add:  "there remains a very real question about whether North American churches are willing to accept the same teaching on matters of sexual morality as is generally accepted elsewhere in the Communion."  In other words, the Bishops doubt whether the Canadian and U.S. Churches remain part of that  "one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic church" that all Anglicans profess to believe in each and every time they recite the Creed.

.... No one expected the global Primates to be quite so direct and forceful; the after-shocks will be felt for some time. Orthodox Anglicans will regard this development as an answer to prayer; it is harder to predict how the Canadian House of Bishops will take such a public face-slapping.

It has been estimated that roughly a third of Canadian Bishops oppose the blessing of same-sex unions on theological grounds; many others are closet supporters of Bishop Ingham, even though some regret his timing and his preening ego.  Will the Bishops common desire for  "peace in our time" trump theology and doctrine?  We shall have to wait and see...

If the Canadian Bishops want a text for their upcoming deliberations, I make bold to suggest these words of the Old Testament prophet, Jeremiah:  ""It is you - shepherds of my people - who have scattered my flock; it is you who have driven them away; it is you who have not attended to them" (Jeremiah 23; 1-2).