Five Primates confirm not going to Lambeth and Lady Primate comments

Five primates announce Lambeth Conference boycott
Presiding Bishop says 'gathering will be diminished by their absence'
By Matthew Davies[Episcopal News Service]

Five Anglican Primates, four from Africa and one from south America, have publicized their intentions to boycott the 2008 Lambeth Conference in a letter responding to a group of English bishops who had urged them to attend the once-a-decade gathering.

Archbishops Peter Akinola of Nigeria, Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, BenjaminNzimbi of Kenya, Henry Orombi of Uganda, and Gregory Venables of theSouthern Cone -- who make up five of the 38 Anglican Primates -- told the 21English bishops that they would not attend Lambeth in protest to the invitations extended by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Episcopal Church's bishops. Akinola, Kolini and Orombi had all previously announced that they intended to boycott the conference.

Neva Rae Fox, the Episcopal Church's public affairs officer, noted that Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is saddened by the primates'decision not to attend Lambeth.

"The gathering will be diminished by their absence, and I imagine that they themselves will miss a gift they might have otherwise received," the Presiding Bishop said. "None of us is called to 'feel at home' except in the full and immediate presence of God. It is our searching, especially with those we find most 'other,' that is likely to lead us into the fuller experience of the body of Christ. Fear of the other is an invitation to seek the face of God, not a threat to be avoided."

Full story:
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/79901_94975_ENG_HTM.htm

- - - - -P.S. from PT

I wonder what this does to the people of the diocese of San Joaquin, CA., now in the Southern Cone?

The Bishop was so insistent that communion with Canterbury was absolutely part of his Anglicanism, and here his new Province is acting as if it is NOT really in communion with the See.

Maybe I have missed something.

Likewise for the Canadians with the Southern Cone--most of them loyal subjects of the Queen--they must be upset by this seeming setting aside of Communion with the See (and thus the C of E).