Windsor Continuation Grope - update

Anglican Mainstream just published the document to which RG alluded (and whose selections I quoted in the previous message). Nothing I said there seems to be changed by this new documentation (quite the contrary!), so, let me just highlight a few points.

First, it's even clearer that the WCG sees itself working hand-in-glove with the Covenant Process. (I've put some initial comments up on that Covenant notion already).

The Covenant proposals are an important response to these issues. It is, therefore, crucially important that all Provinces engage seriously with the proposed Covenant. If the questions we have identified above are to be addressed they can be resolved most obviously by the implementation of the Covenant.

Second, it continues to see itself within the framework of the existing Instruments and just wants to clarify them. (Not reject or abandon them, as Williams has accused GAFCon of doing).

The instruments of communion, rethought and strengthened alongside the Lambeth Quadrilateral, will help us to regain a sense of Anglican identity and unity and thus recognise Church in one another.

It commends other on-going and existing committees as well, noting (among others) that "the Listening Process and conversation on issues of sexuality needs to continue."

All it says about this "Anglican Inquisition" is that

the Common Principles of Canon Law Project (Anglican Communion Legal Advisers Network) gives a sense of the integrity of Anglicanism and we commend the suggestion for the setting up of an Anglican Communion Faith and Order Commission.

In other words, this non-binding committee which will eventually recommend something to ++Williams has circulated a position paper for discussion in which it comments that it likes the suggestion of a different committee. That committee, set up in 2002 by the ACC -- in other words before VGR's consecration -- was based on the notion that

there are principles of canon law common to the churches within the Anglican Communion; their existence can be factually established; each province or church contributes through its own legal system to the principles of canon law common within the Communion; these principles have a strong persuasive authority and are fundamental to the self-understanding of each of the churches of the Communion

and that

shared principles of canon law may be understood to constitute a fifth 'instrument of unity'…to provide a basic framework to sustain the minimal conditions which allow the Churches of the Communion to live together in harmony and unity.

Which means, these are not new principles of law but existing principles, already shared and functioning as an implicit "fifth instrument" of unity.

The Legal Advisors Network -- to remind you, that's the other committee that issued a suggestion which the WCG committee has endorsed, that suggestion being to set up yet another committee, this "Faith and Order Commission" -- was charged merely to articulate these existing common norms:

On the primates' recommendation, the Anglican Consultative Council (Hong Kong, September 2002) approved the establishment of the Anglican Communion Legal Advisers' Network “to produce a statement of the principles of canon law common to the churches, and to examine shared problems and possible solutions."

As far as I can tell from their website, to date this group has managed only to issue a draft report on what they believe those "common principles" to be.


Somehow, I don't think there's any pressing emergence of a Spanish Inquisition to be worried about.

So... no Inquisition today. Inquisition tomorrow.

There's always an inquisition tomorrow.