Carrying a big stick

Okay, so this is third-hand information, and rumors at best. But, if it’s true, it’s a disaster-in-the-making.

Is the Anglican Communion looking at imposing a top-down command structure, a “Pope Lite” so to speak, to deal with current divisions? From a summary of a Times of London article.

The Archbishop of Canterbury may be granted new powers under secret proposals to force rebel Anglican churches into line, reports The Times newspaper. The planned changes in church law would apparently give Dr Rowan Williams the power to intervene in the affairs of churches outside England for the first time since the Church was established by Henry VIII.
The proposals, which would have to be agreed by the Church’s separate provinces, have already aroused suspicions that they will turn the Archbishop into an Anglican version of the Pope suggests the newspaper. The powers are proposed in a legal document presented to the 37 Anglican primates who met at Lambeth Palace last week.
At present, the Archbishop of Canterbury has moral authority amongst bishops but no juridical authority.

Granted that a loose union can lead to irreconsilable divisions if they pass the “live and let live” level of contention (as the ordination of women did not, but issues of same-gender relationships may), the way of dealing with such divisions should not be the ratcheting up of legal power to enforce orthodoxy. That rarely seems to work long for churches, and is usually more of a guarantor of schism.

Bottom line, I cannot imagine the Episcopal Church acceding to something of this sort.

And those conservatives who might be support of this sort of thing to crack down on “rebel Anglican churches” should beware that power is a two-edged sword. If, for example, a majority of provinces should decide that ordination of homosexual bishops was a good thing, would they want the Archbishop of Canterbury to be able to intervene in their provinces? Once there’s a whip to be cracked, it sooner or later ends up in the hands of someone you don’t like.

The paper emphasises that any new powers would be used only in exceptional circumstances. “There is no hidden aggrandisement policy on the part of the Archbishop and his advisers,” a senior source told the Times. “But the present divisions are acute and need to be addressed urgently.”
According to the paper presented to the primates, the aim would be to give the Archbishop of Canterbury power to intervene in the internal affairs of another province “for the sake of maintaining communion within the said province and between the said province and the rest of the Anglican Communion”.

How often are powers ever given up, when taken up in “exceptional circumstances”? Not often. And even when they are, the boundaries between “exceptional” and “ordinary” circumstances tend to erode pretty quickly when there’s such an easy out.

This is, to be sure, only a news report on a secret proposal. But I hope that the primates of the AC think long and hard before moving forward with anything like this. Better a relatively amicable separation based on irreconsilable differences of doctrine, than a hostile rebellion in the face of dictates.

(via Rich)