Posted on 02/09/2007 5:27:06 PM PST by sionnsar
Main Entry: pri'mate
Etymology: Middle English primat, from Old French, from Medieval Latin primat-, primas archbishop, from Latin, leader, from primus
Date: 13th century
1 often capitalized : a bishop who has precedence in a province, group of provinces, or a nation
2 archaic : one first in authority or rank : LEADER
3 [New Latin Primates, from Latin, plural of primat-, primas] : any of an order (Primates) of mammals comprising humans, apes, monkeys, and related forms (as lemurs and tarsiers)
-pri'mate-ship \-*ship\ noun
--pri-ma'tial \pr*-*m*-sh*l\ adjective
Michael Scott-Joynt, the Anglican Bishop of Winchester, on next week's Primates Meeting:
The best outcome of all will be for the Primates to hold together, with no one leaving the meeting, in clear support for the Windsor Report and of their own affirmation of it at Dromantine in Northern Ireland nearly two years ago — and looking forward to the completion of the Covenant for the Anglican Communion on which work has recently begun under the leadership of Archbishop Drexel Gomes of the West Indies.
And the most damaging outcomes? The Meeting could prove unable to join in affirming the Windsor Report as the Anglican Communion’s “road-map”; some of the Primates could walk out of the meeting; especially, the “Global South” Primates could lose their cohesion, and they and Archbishop Rowan (the ABC) could fail to agree on the way forward, and some of them could walk out. Perhaps most controversially, the Primate of the Episcopal Church might be seated as a full member of the Meeting — and I am in no doubt that this would destroy the authority in the Communion, and in the eyes of our Ecumenical partners, of the Windsor Report. The present level of crisis and division within the Anglican Communion was sparked by the decision of the Episcopal Church USA’s General Convention of 2003 to confirm the election as a bishop of Gene Robinson; and by the then Presiding Bishop’s decision, contrary to the judgement of his colleague-Primates a few months later, to consecrate him.
Last year’s General Convention of what is now called “The Episcopal Church” (TEC) did not, in the judgement of many other Provinces and of more than a quarter of its own Bishops, make a sufficient response to the Windsor Report. Many parishes, among them most of the largest in the church, have left TEC and sought episcopal oversight from eight or nine other Provinces. The Province of Nigeria has consecrated a TEC priest bishop for its people in the USA, to whom many TEC parishes are beginning to look. Thousands of families and individuals have left TEC, not only on account of the General Convention’s decisions about sexual behaviour but also because they find that TEC — and its new Presiding Bishop (PB) Katherine Jefferts Schori — are increasingly departing from basic Christian belief in the Lordship and Uniqueness of Christ.I hope that the ABC and at least a clear majority of his colleagues will recognise and support the Windsor-compliant bishops and dioceses of the TEC as a “college” of bishops, still formally within TEC but commissioned by the Primates both to hold together their own life (including by appropriate means that of the three Forward in Faith dioceses currently threatened with extinction by TEC) and to offer episcopal ministry to “Windsor-compliant” parishes in Dioceses whose bishops are unsympathetic to them.
This College should seek, too, to encourage back into its “Anglican Communion-recognised” life first those parishes that have left TEC, and then in time the Nigerian-sponsored churches and those of the (Rwanda and SE Asia sponsored) Anglican Mission in America. If the Meeting as a whole does not support some such arrangement, it is highly possible that the Global South Primates will do so themselves — with serious consequences for the unity of the Anglican Communion and the position within it of the See of Canterbury.
If a proposal for such a provisional arrangement within TEC is to “work”, next week’s meeting will need to support the ABC in a much stronger and more persuasive negotiation with the PB and those around her, so as to win their consent to proposals of this kind even though they will require TEC’s agreement that bishops may in certain circumstances offer episcopal ministry in Dioceses other than their own.
A very significant prize from such an agreement — both for TEC and for the Communion — would be the ending of the “bordercrossing” into TEC dioceses by African, South American and other bishops of which the Windsor Report was properly critical. By such a decision nextweek’s meeting would clearly signal its affirmation of the Windsor Report as the Anglican Communion’s “roadmap”, both to the Provinces of the Communion, those of the British Isles among them, and to our major ecumenical partners.
Some Primates have threatened to leave if the PB is received as a full member of the Meeting. I hope and pray that these too will after all receive her, and express to her their doctrinal and ethical orthodoxy, graciously; and that they will stay in the meeting to work out with her how she and her church can be held in a new kind of association with the Communion and the Primates’ Meeting until they choose to return fully to the Anglican family.
As expected once again, the Episcopal left is bent. Mark Harris sounds like he's just about ready to give up on the whole Anglican enterprise:
The Archbishop of Canterbury has been accused of being on the side of the realignment crowd. I have resisted this, first from genuine care and affection for Archbishop Williams. And then even knowing that he has meet with and attended to the realignment folk (in this Bishop Marshall is absolutely correct), I supposed it was because the Archbishop felt he had to give attention to those whose pain was greatest. I even thought that given his considerable wisdom and theological understanding, he understood his job to be to push unity first and foremost and that therefore we ought to cut him some slack.
But when Durham and Winchester to come out with the old ’one two’ punch I am reminded:
The Archbishop really did meet with the folk putting together the Network in September 2003, and said fine. The now Bishop Minns was there. He sent bishops to the House of Bishops Meeting before General Convention, bishops, including the Archbishop of York to General Convention to tell us what we needed to be about. He sent bishops to meet with twenty "Windsor compliant" bishops, about half being bishops in the Network, and this week, strangely, they come out supporting a very specific set of proposals that line up nicely with the Network, the Global South / CAPA "Road to Lambeth", and even the LEAC proposals. This belies any claim by the Archbishop to be even modestly impartial.
About the presence and seating of the Presiding Bishop, a matter of some concern, the Bishop of Winchester wrote,
"And the most damaging outcomes? The Meeting could prove unable to join in affirming the Windsor Report as the Anglican Communion’s "road-map"; some of the Primates could walk out of the meeting; especially, the "Global South" Primates could lose their cohesion, and they and Archbishop Rowan (the ABC) could fail to agree on the way forward, and some of them could walk out. Perhaps most controversially, the Primate of the Episcopal Church might be seated as a full member of the Meeting — and I am in no doubt that this would destroy the authority in the Communion, and in the eyes of our Ecumenical partners, of the Windsor Report. The present level of crisis and division within the Anglican Communion was sparked by the decision of the Episcopal Church" (highlight mine.)
The Bishop of Winchester, who we may at this point assume does not speak simply for himself, believes that seating Presiding Bishop Jefferts-Schori "as a full member of the Meeting" would "destroy the authority in the Communion, and in the eyes of our Ecumenical partners, of the Windsor Report.
There it is: The Archbishop’s second man speaks. It would appear he believes that the Presiding Bishop ought not be seated as a "full member of the Meeting." He invokes the fear that the Archbishop would lose authority in the Communion (read with some Primates in the Global South) and in the Ecumenical community (read Rome).
Jim Naughton gets in the expected name-calling while Maddie Boy is as classy as he usually is.
I honestly wonder why the Anglican left has stayed with the Anglican Communion for as long as it has. The Communion is, as they say, what it is. And absent a pillar of fire and/or cloud at Mount Sinai and a Voice that scares us to death, none of us Neanderthal reactionaries are EVER going to agree about THE ISSUE, the only measure of morality that exists as far as the left is concerned. So why the Anglican left hasn't shaken Canterbury's dust from its feet a long time ago and gone on to preach its "gospel" escapes me. Unless, of course, they're not all that sure of the "gospel" that they preach.
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. My guess is that a TEC separation from the AC would have significant weight in current and future property disputes between those parishes that remain Anglican and orthodoxly Christian, and those that remain part of TEC.
I think you've got an excellent guess there. The signs all seem to be, "We're leaving -- just not yet."
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