This will be a great celebration in many ways. It will provide CANA and the Church of Nigeria with additional bishops to minister to the growing flock of Anglican Christians in CANA who are part of the growing orthodox realignment within the larger communion. A second way this celebration is significant is that these consecrations will be (by permission of His Grace Peter J.

At its outset and for more than a century and into the Twentieth Century, property rights in American Anglicanism were not vested in higher ecclesial bodies, such as a diocese or the national church. The first serious challenge to this foundational polity did not come until the Civil War and that precedent served to confirm that the local parish was still the basic unit of the American Episcopal church and that the local parish was the owner of its property and buildings.

Apart from Pope Benedict and a few others, most of the addressees are Eastern church leaders. This is to be welcomed but the letter does not mention the harassment, persecution and murder which Christians are experiencing in so many Muslim lands today. It does not refer to the need for a common commitment to fundamental freedoms of thought, expression, belief and changing one's belief.

The current work of breaking up traditional dioceses, whose bishops are still recognized as faithful leaders by the Communion's Instruments of Unity, including by her Primates, has been going on at least since 2000. Its pace, however, has recently accelerated in some places, like the Diocese of Central Florida and the Southwestern part of the church. What shall we say about this trend?