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The Times-Picayune
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
N.O. becomes the accidental backdrop for a high-stakes meeting to save the world's Anglican communion
By Bruce Nolan Staff writer
The archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, arrives in New Orleans today hoping to find a way to keep the world's third-largest Christian church from breaking up in a global clash over homosexuality
The Most Rev. Rowan Williams will meet with about 160 Episcopal bishops from around the United States, and key primates or heads of Anglican churches from other countries, in talks Thursday and Friday at the Hotel InterContinental.
His mission is to find a way to avert a rift between the 2.4-million-member Episcopal Church (USA) and more conservative Anglican churches in 37 other geographic provinces. Many of their leaders believe the Episcopal church has broken faith with Christianity by supporting same-sex unions and ordaining gay bishops and other clergy.
The Anglican Communion numbers 70 million members; in Christianity only the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches are larger.
In other times, the five-day meeting might have been a routine, semiannual gathering of the church's House of Bishops to study together, socialize and conduct church business.
But the affliction Hurricane Katrina spread across the region gives the meeting an additional gloss: Bishops said they wanted to visit New Orleans to support the city and inspect the work of the Episcopal church's Jericho Road housing initiative and other Episcopal relief projects.
Bishop Charles Jenkins of the Diocese of Louisiana asked each to bring a gift of $10,000 to be divided between Louisiana and Mississippi.
Many will, he said Tuesday -- and Bishop Mark Lawrence of South Carolina has pledged to arrive with a gift of $100,000, Jenkins said.
He said the bishops probably will bring gifts totaling more than $1 million.
A growing separation
But the meeting has taken on even greater significance for the Anglican Communion, which for 30 years has been under steadily increasing strain over the Episcopal church's acceptance of same-sex unions and gay bishops who live with partners.
For Anglicans here and abroad it tests the very definition of what it means to be an Anglican.
Worldwide, 37 autonomous Anglican churches are linked to the Church of England in a voluntary communion of shared traditions, theology and mission. The archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual head of the communion, first among equals by consent of the other primates.
The overseas primates, led by powerful African clergy such as Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, are pressuring Williams to declare that because of its nontraditional view of homosexuality, the Episcopal church is no longer a full member of the Anglican Communion.
Williams has resisted for the sake of unity. He has engaged all sides in constant negotiations, hoping to appeal to the church's common legacy in dealing with the dispute.
Deadline is Sept. 30
The latest crisis stems from a meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, last spring, where Anglican primates from around the world demanded that the Episcopal church declare it would not authorize same-sex unions and would ordain no more partnered gay clergy after the 2003 ordination of Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.
The primates also suggested the creation of an alternative leadership structure inside the Episcopal church to provide spiritual care for dismayed conservative Episcopalians.
The primates demanded a reply by Sept. 30, giving the New Orleans meeting a sudden, unexpected prominence.
A few weeks later, Episcopal bishops rejected the proposals and asked Williams to come to the New Orleans meeting.
American bishops on both sides of the sexuality question seemed to form a strong consensus against the foreign primates' proposal to create their own leadership structures inside the American church, an idea widely viewed as a violation of each church's autonomy.
In recent months, however, to the dismay of Williams and most Episcopal bishops, Akinola and other African bishops have begun ordaining their own new conservative American bishops inside the Episcopal church, effectively creating an embryonic structure for conservatives under their own oversight.
The bishops' schedule calls for closed-door meetings with Williams all day Thursday and Friday morning. First among the Episcopal bishops will be Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, a defender of faithful gays and lesbians, who was elected last summer.
Representatives of overseas primates demanding change also will sit in on the talks, according to a schedule the church released.
"It seems now the way it's going to work is they're going to have to go home and digest what they've heard" before declaring their response to whatever the Americans put forward, Jenkins said.
Hoping to avoid a split
Few observers expect the Episcopal bishops to retreat from their steady course of the past 30 years.
"We expect the House of Bishops will continue the direction they've already set," said Peter Frank, a spokesman for the Anglican Communion Network, a fellowship of nine conservative dioceses and 650 to 700 congregations. He said conservative bishops will leave the New Orleans meeting when Williams leaves. The meeting is scheduled to continue until Tuesday.
Jenkins said he and 10 co-signers will offer a resolution that tracks the overseas primates' wishes: banning same-sex rites, ending ordination of gay bishops, and establishing some kind of alternative Episcopal leadership for conservative congregations.
But he said his highest priority is to hold the communion together even with its divisions.
"The most devastating thing, and the thing I do not want to see happen, is that there becomes two Anglican communions in North America," he said. "It is a sickness unto death. If we claim to be a catholic body, this is a temptation to which we cannot give in.
"On a more pragmatic level, those who will be hurt the most by this are the poor," he said. "We are involved heavily around the world in ministries of relief and development. And I don't think we have the luxury of giving in to our self-absorption on this issue, and taking that energy and those resources away from the poor."
He said he and other bishops have informally discussed new forms of keeping conservatives and liberals inside the church.
He said two models might take off on slight measures of diversity in Roman Catholicism: one in which religious orders with their own governance run certain Catholic parishes, and another in which Eastern-rite Catholics conduct their own forms of worship and governance while remaining in full communion with Rome.
Neither of those models, however, contains theological differences as great as those dividing the Anglican Communion.
Some diocesan Web sites this week carried an unconfirmed report from The Living Church, an independent Episcopal publication, reporting that Jefferts Schori would propose to the House of Bishops that she appoint an alternative leadership structure for conservatives, as the overseas primates proposed -- but the appointments would be hers, not theirs.
That idea already has reportedly drawn opposition. The publication said Fort Worth Bishop Jack Iker, a conservative leader, said conservatives would not accept pastoral oversight from the "unilateral dictates" of Jefferts Schori.
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