c. 2004 Religion News Service
ROME _ An eminent Episcopal theologian sees the present crisis in the Anglican Communion over the American church’s consecration of an openly gay bishop as a logical outgrowth of the civil rights movement in an independent church founded on the democratic principles of the American Revolution.
But R. William Franklin believes the Episcopal Church may well have to sacrifice some of its historical independence if the 77 million-member Anglican Communion, to which it belongs, is to remain viable.
Along with the Scripture-based debate about homosexuality, the crisis raises underlying questions about the lack of central authority in the communion, which includes 36 self-governing provinces with the archbishop of Canterbury as spiritual leader.
A commission appointed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to make suggestions for resolving the crisis is also studying whether his role should be expanded to include some form of practical authority over the worldwide communion.
“The model of the Anglican Communion is a federation of local churches, but does the 21st century call for a whole that is more than its parts?” Franklin asked.
Franklin, dean emeritus of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University and presently associate for education at Trinity Church, Copley Square, Boston, spoke about the threatened schism within the Anglican Communion and its implications for ecumenical dialogue to a largely Roman Catholic audience Monday (April 19) at Rome’s ecumenical Centro Pro Unione.
Sixteen provinces of the Anglican Communion have broken off relations with the Episcopal Church, and 12 Episcopal dioceses no longer recognize Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, who consecrated V. Gene Robinson as Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire on Nov. 2.
Meeting with Williams at the Vatican on Oct. 6, Pope John Paul II had warned that the consecration would present “new and serious difficulties” for dialogue, and the Vatican suspended formal Anglican-Roman Catholic talks on Dec. 2.
But both sides agreed to open informal talks on the “ecclesiological issue” involved, and Franklin said that the Roman Catholic Church with its well-defined hierarchy and rejection of the democratic model can greatly assist Anglicans in its self-examination at this time.
“Events have called us to deepen our conversation rather than to arbitrarily call off our conversation,” he said. “Dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church is forcing us to answer questions.”
Tracing the history of the Episcopal Church from the American Revolution through the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Franklin said that while the ordination of an openly gay bishop was unprecedented, the decision to do so followed a clear pattern.
The Anglicans who created the post-revolutionary Episcopal Church balanced a “Catholic structure and faith with this new thing, democracy,” Franklin said. After the war of independence they had no ties to the Church of England.
Bishops are elected by their dioceses, and the church government is modeled on the American government, consisting of the two houses of the General Convention, one made up of bishops and the other of elected clerical and lay delegates. The presiding bishop answers to the convention.
Franklin said that the present situation is “not unlike the situation that the church faced at the start of the Civil War in the spring of 1861” when 12 dioceses threatened to pull out over the question of slavery. Two years later, the General Convention voted to reject the Confederacy.
“Today the text is the Holy Scripture; then it was the United States Constitution,” he said.
From its early days a pattern of independent action emerged, starting with the decision by William White, chaplain to the Continental Congress and later the first bishop of Pennsylvania, to ordain the first African-American priest, Franklin said.
When White ordained Absalom Jones in Philadelphia in 1804, he acted against the rules of the General Convention. The General Convention changed those rules only after the Civil War.
In 1974, three bishops in Philadelphia ordained 11 women as priests, again acting well in advance of permission from the General Convention. Franklin said the ordinations were a result of the feminism that, like gay rights, grew out of the civil rights movement.
Robinson’s election as bishop by the New Hampshire diocese also preceded any action by the General Convention to condone homosexual prelates. Both houses later voted to approve the election because it was legally conducted by the diocese.
“If they had tried to introduce legislation to allow the consecration of a gay bishop, I don’t think it would have gotten to the floor,” Franklin said, “but polity won out.”
“I think there is a real pattern here, a very American pattern, this pattern of individual action but eventual absorption into the general body,” he said.
In each case, starting with the ordination of Absalom Jones, the action “stems from the belief that it is God’s desire that every man and woman take part in the church,” Franklin said.
DEA/PH END POLK
