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Split inevitable. Williams playing for time - by Christoper S. Johnson [MCJ]

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Around the end of April, the Anglican bishops from Canada and the United States will meet. One prominent Anglican bishop won't be joining them:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has rejected an invitation to attend a joint meeting in April of U.S. and Canadian bishops next month in a move that the Canadian primate, Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, said is clearly linked to the turmoil over homosexuality.

Hutch is unhappy about it.

"It does send a very, very negative symbol to the Canadian church, no question," Archbishop Hutchison said in an interview. "The message it sends to us is that at the moment he does not want to be associated with the Canadians."

Really unhappy.

Archbishop Williams’ reason for declining to attend the meeting of North American bishops, scheduled for April 25-May 1 with sessions in Windsor, Ont., and Detroit, was "the present situation and he also refers to a meeting that he should be attending," said Archbishop Hutchison. However, he added, "Our invitation went out to him over a year ago and I’m sure that this (other) meeting is not something that he (had) committed (to) before our invitation."

Archbishop Hutchison said he was troubled by Archbishop Williams’ decision. "I’m very upset because it goes against what I believe is his own personal position (on homosexuality) and he has expressed it pretty publicly and in other circumstances," he said.

So's Bruce Howe.

Canadian bishop Bruce Howe, who is on the organizing committee and in whose Huron diocese the meeting will take place, said that he was a "little disappointed." Considering what happened in northern Ireland, he said, Archbishop Williams "should have made more of an effort to come, to make a pastoral visit to the Canadian and American bishops." However, he added, "I understand the optics. In the context of unity, he doesn’t want to send a signal to the other primates that he’s not taking them seriously. But he should be here."

There are two ways of looking at this situation. Without realizing it, Rowan Williams may be trying to play the role of an Anglican Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's hatred of slavery did not translate into a love of black people; like most antebellum Americans, North and South, Lincoln was no abolitionist and would probably be considered a racist today. But Lincoln's passionate desire to preserve a thing he did love, the Union, led him to use force against the Confederate States and step by step to achieve the goal of the abolitionists, the eradication of slavery.

As most people know, my gracious lord of Canterbury is no theological conservative. But Dr. Williams does apparently value the Anglican Communion and thinks that it is well worth preserving. And he has no doubt heard or read all the stalling, the legalism and the outright defiance from ECUSA and ACC bishops since the release of the Windsor Report and he was there in October, 2003 when Frank Griswold lied to his face. Since it is only conservatives who respect the Anglican tradition these days, it is only natural that Rowan Williams would, however reluctantly, find himself in an alliance of sorts with them.

The other possibility is this: the Newry primates meeting was indeed an Anglican revolution and Dr. Williams knows that in the Anglican world, power and influence have left Lambeth Palace, never to return. He knows that the orthodox bishops in Africa and elsewhere in the Third World hold all the cards and that the Newry statement was their concession to him, a concession they didn't have to make. My gracious lord of Canterbury can afford to offend the Canadians but if he wants to keep the Anglican Communion in one piece, he must stay on Peter Akinola's good side.

So Rowan Williams cannot possibly attend this meeting without provoking an official Anglican split well before the next Lambeth Conference in 2008. This suggests that Dr. Williams knows that an Anglican split is inevitable and is desperately playing for time.

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