Dear Dick Kim,
Never have I had such negative thoughts and feelings about the international Anglican Family of Churches as I do now, and never have I thought and felt that the task of uniting faithful American Anglicans is and will be such a difficult -- maybe virtually impossible -- task.
Looking back to the Press Conference in Northern Ireland at the end of the Primates' Meeting, and recalling the claims made for the Communiqué, especially by Dr Carnley of Australia (its primary author), I see more and more that the 'conservative' Primates made a very major mistake in agreeing to it -- for its content falls so far below what they have since been saying in public as to what really they believed they were agreeing to in their Meeting! There are times when trying to be 'nice' and 'accommodating' and 'gentle' means that one is actually being unkind and helping to spread falsehood.
The recent response to the Communiqué by the ECUSA House of Bishops has the outward dress of reasonableness, decency and patience. It was possible to compose it in this way because the Communiqué says more about affirming homosexual persons than condemning homosexual sex and it merely identifies the innovations of North America as being a different approach to that in place in the rest of the Anglican Churches. From neither the Communiqué nor the Response from ECUSA Bishops would one ever get the impression that there were at least 16 Primates who were/are not in eucharistic communion with the North American Houses of Bishops and were/are also not in communion with Bishops who say they are in communion with the bishops of the North American Churches. (This situation calls in question the very idea and name of 'Communion of Churches'!)
It would have been helpful and honest for the Archbishops of the West Indies and of Uganda, who also spoke at the Press Conference, to have explained that the Communiqué was written to convey the very minimum sense of horror and outrage felt by the majority of the Primates at the innovations being pursued in North America. But they said nothing -- that I can remember (I was there) -- like this at all. And so the impression has gone out into the world that Dr. Carnley's view of what (should have) happened is the correct one, and to this 'incorrect' one, the ECUSA bishops have responded. Meanwhile conservatives, who want the Communiqué to say what the African Primates are now actually telling their flocks and friends, are locked into a document that is as supportive of the innovators in the long term as it is of the traditionalists!
What a mess Anglicans have got themselves into because of lack of open and clear honesty.
Yours truly,
Peter Toon
March 16th 2005
No comments:
Post a Comment