Bishops Wright and Stancliffe have responded to Cardinal Walter Kasper’s request for no unilateral Anglican decisions about ordaining women bishops until a Church-wide consensus develops. But their response is not quite as rigorous as they hope:
‘One of the most important points at which Cardinal Kasper seems to us to misrepresent the Anglican situation comes at the point where he indicates that he and others look to the Church of England as holding a place of decisive significance within Anglicanism, so that despite the fact that there are already women bishops in some Provinces of the Anglican Communion the decision of the Church of England would somehow be key or crucial. That may be an accurate indication of how we are perceived, but the Church of England does not occupy the place in the Communion that the Vatican does in our sister church. Indeed, that imperial model – Ecclesia Anglicana telling the colonies how to behave – is precisely what we have done our best to avoid for several generations. As set out in the Windsor Report, we have a modus operandi according to which a potentially contentious issue can come to the Lambeth Conference, to the Anglican Consultative Council, and to the Primates’ Meeting. To put it simply, if the Lambeth Conference gives a green light to a proposal, it is then up to an individual province to decide whether to adopt any new development for itself. We must not for a moment collude with the impression that the Church of England occupies a position analogous to the Vatican and that the Lambeth Conference is merely an expensive piece of window-dressing. This tells heavily against the argument, sometimes advanced from within Anglicanism itself, that the decision we now face in the Church of England is the real defining moment. The Lambeth Conference has already given the green light to ordaining women to the episcopate; all we are being asked now is whether we, in our Province, want to adopt for ourselves something to which worldwide Anglicanism has already given approval, and which can therefore not be seen within our own inter-provincial polity as communion-breaking.’
Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, and David Stancliffe, Bishop of Salisbury Women Bishops:A Response to Cardinal Kasper
My understanding of catholicity is that it involves every part of the church in subordination to every other in love, and therefore also in obedience and truth. This does involve us in waiting for one another, and so it always has a cost: it is in fact Christian suffering. None of us can just do what we want; we are not servants or priests or bishops by right: we cannot make ourselves leaders of the church; we cannot unilaterally make decisions for ‘our‘ part of the church. We have to wait for the rest of the Church to see in us those gifts the Lord has given to us. The rest of the Church really is in authority over us. Those outside the Church might call this ‘imperialism’, but catholicity is what we call it.
Collegiality always requires a single authority, which involves an central office, an institution with a budget – a magisterium. This is what Canterbury (in my case) represents – despite Canterbury’s own denials – and beyond Canterbury it is all the other Archbishops and Patriarchs, gathered in mutual deference and love, around some single Patriarch, which, out of habit or tradition if for no other reason, means in effect Benedict in Rome. We Anglicans should try to keep up with Benedict – and of course gently and constantly offer our Reformed and evangelical correction to the Roman curia. There is no either-or about Canterbury and the rest-of-the-Church-conveniently-represented-by Rome. Rome does not threaten our Anglican identity – it only threatens our endless readiness to endanger the catholicity of the whole Church by our pursuit of every worldly agenda.
This Christianity lark is not easy: all this controversy is part of the suffering that comes as we are formed together in Christ. Let us be thankful for one another and for all on the other side in each of these struggles for the identity of the people of Jesus Christ.
