FROM CRANMER TO WELBY

From Patheos-

This year more than most, March 21 is a date of multiple significance in the Church of England. You might justly ask whether the English church still matters much on the world stage, but the wider Anglican Communion assuredly does: by the middle of this century, there could well be 150 million Anglicans worldwide.

Historically, March 21 commemorates the burning of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer by Mary Tudor’s Catholic regime, in 1556. Cranmer has a fair claim to rank as the founder of the Anglican tradition and the creator of its liturgy and Book of Common Prayer. He is also a complex figure who had gone far towards compromising with the regime in an attempt to save his life. Ultimately, though, he died as a martyr.

That contorted story explains his appeal for modern writers and biographers. Charles Williams wrote a wonderful play about Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury (1936), which bears comparison with that other great religious play of the British 1930s, Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.

This year, though, Anglican identity is even more centrally in the news on March 21 because of the enthronement of Justin Welby as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury, in a line dating back to St. Augustine in 597. As the media have reported extensively, the new Archbishop faces an extremely difficult political situation in that church, which is deeply split over issues of homosexuality, and the election of women bishops.

More here-

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2013/03/from-cranmer-to-welby/http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2013/03/from-cranmer-to-welby/