From The Living Church
The Most Rev. George L. Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991-2002, offered a sober and sometimes bleak assessment of the Communion’s future and had challenging words both for the Instruments of Communion and The Episcopal Church on April 16.
Archbishop Carey was the keynote speaker at “Anglicanism: A Gift in Christ,” a two-day conference of the Anglican Communion Institute and the Communion Partner Primates, Bishops and Rectors at St. Martin’s in Houston. The title of his address was “Holding Fast and Holding On, The Instruments of Communion.”
Archbishop Carey began by tracing the history of the development of the Instruments of Communion: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the primates’ meeting. Each one, he argued, developed primarily in response to some crisis within the life of the Communion and a desire on the part of the members to develop unity through interdependence.
This trajectory toward greater interdependence existed until 2003 when “the Episcopal Church of the United States, by ordaining Gene Robinson, against the strong advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the moral authority of Lambeth ’98, [and] the appeals of the primates’ meeting, led the Anglican Communion into the worst crisis it has ever faced, and from which it is unlikely to recover.”
Addressing directly developments in the United States and Canada, Archbishop Carey said, “Some provinces – notably in North America – press for total autonomy theologically from the Communion, while at the same time they impose total canonical autocracy within their dioceses. Ironically and oddly, in such a democratic nation as the United States, a system of ‘prince bishops’ has arisen who appear to have unfettered control over their rapidly diminishing flocks [and] from which all who dissent from the regnant liberalism are being driven out.”
More here-
http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2009/4/17/archbishop-carey-tec-likely-to-clean-out-conservatives
2 comments:
You know, if you made it mandatory for all your clergy to be gay/lesbian/Michael Jackson/whatever, you'd probably have fewer problems.
I don't think TEC wants to "clean out" conservatives.
There are a number of priests and bishops in TEC who defend the theology which undergirds successive editions of the Book of Common Prayer's sacramental rites, creeds, and catechisms. They do so in charity and fairness, and with deep theological understanding of the issues which divide us. I wish they would all stay in TEC! However, when some of them act as though they are going to leave TEC, they are met with distrust--not because of what they teach, but because of the enforcement strategy they appear to be espousing.
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