c. 2004 Religion News Service
LONDON _ The Episcopal Church should apologize for stirring disunity but will not face serious sanctions for allowing an openly gay bishop, a blue-ribbon panel said in long-anticipated recommendations made Monday (Oct. 18).
The panel’s 92-page report, issued by Irish Archbishop Robin Eames, stopped short of calling for the U.S. church to be excommunicated from the wider Anglican Communion, but said the decision breached “the proper constraints of the bonds of affection” within the global body of 77 million Christians.
In presenting the report in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Eames called for a moratorium on new gay bishops but said there is “no mechanism for the imposition of a discipline” after the U.S. church consecrated the openly gay V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire.
For now, the report leaves the U.S. church in limbo as conservative dissidents mull their options. For its part, the American hierarchy emerged chastened but intact after the report failed to deliver the fatal blow anticipated by many conservatives.
The report’s critique of the U.S. church was clear. “By electing and confirming such a candidate in the face of the concerns expressed by the wider Communion, the Episcopal Church has caused deep offense to many faithful Anglican Christians both in its own church and in other parts of the Communion,” the report said.
The report called on the U.S. church to “express its regret” for fracturing Anglican unity, and said the seven principal bishops who laid hands on Robinson _ including Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold _ should reconsider their participation in the life of the Communion.
Beyond the moratorium on other gay bishops, the report did not call on Robinson to resign, a move that Robinson has rejected. A spokesman said Robinson would have no immediate comment.
In addition, the report said U.S. and Canadian policies to bless same-sex unions are not a “legitimate application” of Christian faith and urged a halt to such rites, as well as a similar apology.
Eames, presenting the report in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, said Anglican provinces “are not free to depart unilaterally from a shared faith and discipline without this affecting our shared ties as a family.”
The 17-member panel said the Communion’s future depended on a commitment by all sides to “walk together.” If the U.S. church rejected such overtures, it could face excommunication “as an absolute last resort.”
The Eames commission included bishops, clergy and lay members from across the Communion. The sole American member was retired Bishop Mark Dyer of Bethlehem, Pa., who now teaches at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va.
While the report was clear in its rebuke of the North American branches of Anglicanism, it also rejected conservatives’ petitions for a “parallel province” that would allow them to operate outside of the official structures of the Episcopal Church. Throughout the past year, they have sought to be recognized as the “legitimate franchise” of American Anglicanism.
The report said an Episcopal Church plan to allow conservative bishops to minister to likeminded parishes beyond their dioceses seems sufficient, and urged overseas bishops to halt efforts to inject themselves into the internal affairs of the U.S. church.
The Rev. Kendall Harmon, a South Carolina leader of the conservative American Anglican Council, said the report was a “nice try, but clearly insufficient.”
“The Anglican Communion is a wonderful family, but they’ve emphasized family to the seeming neglect of many other factors, one of which is truth,” Harmon said. “The family only has real unity if it has unity in truth.”
The leader of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, appealed to both sides to maintain unity and avoid a “rush to judgment.”
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The report offers “neither easy nor simple solutions to real and demanding challenges,” Williams said in a statement. “If we are serious about meeting those challenges, as I know we are, then we have to do all we can to continue to travel this road together.”
Part of the challenges facing the Communion stem from its looseknit structure, with each of its 38 provinces acting autonomously. The panel chided the North American churches for introducing gay bishops and same-sex unions _ the report called both a type of theological “novelty”_ without considering how either would affect the larger Communion.
“In our view, those involved did not pay due regard in the way they might and … should have done to the wider implications of the decisions they were making and the actions they were taking,” the panel said.
In an effort to beef-up accountability, the panel proposed creating a “Council of Advice” to aid Williams in dealing with controversy. The report, however, said it did not endorse “the accumulation of formal power.” Eames, speaking to reporters, said “Anglicans don’t want a central curia.”
Currently, the only “instruments of unity” within the Communion are the archbishop of Canterbury, the once-every-decade Lambeth Conference of bishops, the Anglican Consultative Council and an annual retreat of top Anglican bishops, or primates.
The panel’s second, more controversial, proposal would create an “Anglican Covenant” that would have “no binding authority” other than a member church’s commitment to uphold it. A proposed draft said bishops could not “be the cause or focus of division and strife in their church or elsewhere in the Communion,” and would compel each province to only act in the “common good” of the wider Communion.
“What touches all should be approved by all,” the draft said.
The proposal came under immediate scrutiny from Griswold, the leader of the U.S. church who supported Robinson and presided at his consecration. “This notion will need to be studied with particular care,” he said.
“Throughout our history we have managed to live with the tension between a need for clear boundaries and for room in order that the Spirit might express itself in fresh ways in a variety of contexts,” he said.
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