Nobody expects the Canterbury Inquisition!

Archbishop of Canterbury


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26 July 2008

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition - and the 650 Anglican bishops gathered for the Lambeth Conference may not have been expecting the Canterbury Inquisition either - but that’s the suggestion coming from a group set up to find ways to settle disputes within the Anglican Communion.

Actually, what the group really recommends is a Faith and Order Commission, ‘able to give guidance on the ecclesiological issues raised by our current “crisis”’. But the Commission has already been likened to the inquisitorial body in some quarters.

The proposal comes in the second of two briefing papers presented to bishops by the Windsor Continuation Group. It isn’t a final suggestion and may well have changed by the time the third paper is presented to bishops next week.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said he was personally ‘quite enthusiastic’ about the proposal but stressed it was merely ‘a flag raised to see who salutes at this stage.’

He added: ‘There is a very strong feeling that we need another kind of structure in the Communion that will be a clearing house for some of these issues. And I think there is quite a head of steam behind that, just to sort out the sort of issues that are arising, what level of seriousness they are at, where they might best be addressed.’

The Anglican Communion is not a single church denomination like the Roman Catholic Church, nor does it have an international constitution like the Lutheran World Federation.

It is a communion of different national churches held together by four ‘Instruments of Unity’ - the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates Meeting, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Lambeth Conference.

As such it has no formal policy or decision making body and no way of resolving disputes such as those caused by disagreements over human sexuality. The Windsor Continuation Group was established to find ways of reaching agreements about what can and can not be considered Anglican orthodoxy.

The Archbishop stressed that no solution would be forced on the churches of the Anglican Communion; and any way forward would have to be agreed. He said: ‘I'm looking for consent, not coercion. But unless we do have something about which we consent which we trust to resolve some of our differences we shall be flying further apart.

‘It's not as if we can just co-exist without any impact on one another as local churches. There have to protocols and conventions by which we recognise one another as churches by which we understand and manage the exchange between ourselves.

‘The difficulties we presently face has to do a lot with that recognition and its failures. Can we find a consensual means of dealing with that because no-one has the authority to impose something? We have to do it with consent and that means some will consent and some won't - and that in itself has implications.’



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