By Douglas LeBlanc
Posted on: June 7, 2010
So far the proposed disciplines within the Archbishop of Canterbury's Pentecost letter have affected only the Episcopal Church, but the letter also has raised questions for the Anglican Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone.
The Secretary General of the Anglican Communion has informed two representatives of the Episcopal Church that they will no longer serve as members of the Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialogue. Those representatives are the Rev. Thomas Ferguson, the Episcopal Church's interim deputy for ecumenical and interreligious relations, and the Rt. Rev. William O. Gregg, assistant bishop of North Carolina.
Episcopal News Service reported that the decision affects the Episcopal Church's involvement in all ecumenical dialogues involving the Anglican Communion.
The archbishop's proposal also has affected the Rt. Rev. C. Franklin Brookhart, Bishop of Montana, who was a member of the Anglican-Methodist International Commission for Unity in Mission, and the Very Rev. William H. Petersen, professor of ecclesiastical and ecumenical history at Bexley Hall, who was a member of the Anglican-Lutheran International Commission.
"Last Thursday I sent letters to members of the Inter Anglican ecumenical dialogues who are from the Episcopal Church informing them that their membership of these dialogues has been discontinued," the Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon wrote in a statement dated June 7. "In doing so I want to emphasize again as I did in those letters the exceptional service of each and every person to that important work and to acknowledge without exception the enormous contribution each person has made."
Without identifying her by name, Canon Kearon added that he has written to the Rev. Katherine Grieb of Virginia Theological Seminary to say that she is no longer a member of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order and inviting her to serve as a consultant to that body.
Canon Kearon has written to two other provinces - the Anglican Church of Canada and the Church of the Southern Cone - asking that they clarify their positions on moratoria proposed by the Windsor Report.
The canon has asked the Anglican Church of Canada "whether its General Synod or House of Bishops has formally adopted policies that breach the second moratorium in the Windsor Report, authorizing public rites of same-sex blessing."
A summary on the Canadian church's website said that the 2007 General Synod "further affirmed that the blessing of same-sex unions is not in conflict with the core doctrine" but "did not affirm the authority of dioceses to authorize the blessing of same-sex unions."
The bishops of two Canadian dioceses, New Westminster and Niagara, have authorized rites for public blessings of same-sex couples. New Westminster distributed its rite in 2003 [PDF]. The Diocese of Niagara has authorized its clergy to include same-sex couples when using the Niagara Rite of Blessing of Civil Marriage.
The canon also has written the Most Rev. Gregory Venables, presiding bishop of the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone, "asking him for clarification as to the current state of his interventions into other provinces."
As they voted to leave the Episcopal Church, diocesan conventions in Fort Worth, Pittsburgh and San Joaquin voted to align themselves with the Southern Cone.
The Anglican Church in North America installed the Most Rev. Robert William Duncan as its first archbishop in June 2009, and seeks to be recognized as another province of the Anglican Communion.
In November 2009, the Fort Worth diocese affirmed its continuing participation in the ACNA but also voted to remain "a member diocese in the Province of the Southern Cone while the formal process of recognition of this new province continues in the Anglican Communion."
Two questions remain for the future, the canon wrote.
"One is the relationship between the actions of a bishop or of a diocese and the responsibilities of a province for those actions - this issue is referred to in the Windsor Continuation Group Report para 48," he wrote. "Secondly, to ask the question of whether maintaining within the fellowship of one's Provincial House of Bishops, a bishop who is exercising episcopal ministry in another province without the expressed permission of that province or the local bishop, constitutes an intervention and is therefore a breach of the third moratorium."
Paragraph 48 of the Windsor Continuation Group's report said, in part: "In cases where a see has, by its actions, impaired Communion, it has now become appropriate to explore what relational consequences should be formally expressed or put in place by the Instruments of Communion. ... Further work remains to be done on who should take action to formalize any such consequences and whether they should be applied at the level of diocese or Province."
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