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The Reverend Canon Professor Christopher Seitz The Reverend Dr. Philip Turner The Reverend Dr. Ephraim Radner Mark McCall, Esq. ACI welcomes the encouragement given by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the decision by the Diocesan Board and Standing Committee of the Diocese of Central Florida to affirm the first three sections of the Anglican Covenant. As we have previously stated, these sections entail substantial commitments to mutual responsibility and interdependence in the life of the Communion. While it is not ACI's prerogative to release the full text of the letter, we are grateful for...
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An Address Delivered to the Convention of The Episcopal Diocese of Dallas October 14, 2009 Bishop Stanton has already addressed the subject of TEC's polity from the perspective of its history and constitution. In just a bit, Dr. Turner will talk about the Anglican covenant, its provisions and background. What I want to do briefly is address both of these topics, but from a different angle: first, to talk about TEC's polity from the perspective of the civil law and then to look at the Anglican covenant from the perspective of TEC polity. I hope when I am done that this is coherent and I can tie...
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"Every Diocese is an independent and sovereign state, held in the unity of the Catholic Church by its Episcopate, according to the rule of St. Cyprian." With these words, Bishop Alexander Charles Garrett - our first Bishop and,be it noted, once the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church - addressed the organizing Convention of the Diocese of Dallas in 1895. "The Diocese thus becomes the ecclesiastical unit, a full and perfect integer sufficient of itself for all purposes of growth and development." It was for the privilege of so organizing and of taking the key next step, that of a...
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The Diocese of South Carolina received a letter from Bonnie Anderson, the elected President of the House of Deputies. It was followed by a second statement saying that it was her practice to send such letters to each Diocese before their conventions. In what follows we pay attention to sections of the first letter, where the President of the House of Deputies spoke at some length of her interpretation of the resolutions to be voted on at the South Carolina Diocesan Convention. These remarks seek to be substantive in character; presumably they represent her own considerations as well as those...
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In recent days, Fr. Mark Harris has published a comment on Bishop Stanton's address to the Convention of the Diocese of Dallas (link) entitled "Bishop Stanton barks up the wrong tree so that we won't notice the bite." (link) The comment demands response because it shows so clearly the dubious nature of both the substance and manner of argumentation within our church. Fr. Harris takes issue with almost everything Bishop Stanton has to say save for one important point. With the Bishop he holds that individual dioceses have a right to sign onto the proposed Anglican Covenant! Coming from the...
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1. Now that the final text of the Anglican Covenant has been sent to the member churches of the Communion, it is useful to outline the procedures by which member churches and other churches enter into the Covenant. In reviewing these procedures, it is important to be mindful of the distinction between committing to the Covenant, which churches may do at any time through affirmation or adoption, and formal recognition of that fact by the other Covenant churches or the Communion Instruments. 2. Section 4 of the Covenant specifies two procedures by which churches may enter the Covenant. Paragraph...
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Advent now shifts into the manifestation of God's good will in the Nativity feast. So too the church takes its self-scrutiny and penitence, and turns in hope to the gift of God's own and new life among us. The final text of the Anglican Covenant has now been sent out for adoption by the churches of the Communion. The slow process by which this text and its official dissemination for action has occurred has frustrated some, yet its persistent progress forward to this point at last puts the lie to the naysayers and early eulogists of the Covenant's purpose. Joined to the restarting of the...
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The Reverend Canon Professor Christopher Seitz The Reverend Dr. Philip Turner The Reverend Dr. Ephraim Radner Mark McCall, Esq. We have learned today from Bishop Mouneer Anis that he has submitted his resignation from the former joint standing committee. Following so closely the release in December of the final text of the Anglican Communion Covenant, this resignation underscores the extent to which the Anglican Communion is at a major crossroads. At this decisive moment, however, substantial doubts have been expressed both publicly by Bishop Mouneer and privately by others as to whether this...
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There is general agreement, I would guess, amongst more traditional Anglicans, that the current set-up for the implementation of the Covenant is flawed, and that especially the ordering of the ACC's Standing Committee in this implementing process is so confused and liable now to engendering such further distrust amongst churches as to demand rethinking. That is what ACI has argued in its paper "The Anglican Communion Covenant: Where Do We Go From Here?" (1.31.10). What we have not argued is that we need to start the whole process of writing a Covenant over again; or that some party must...
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I I owe it to my readers to provide an explanation of a puzzling title. What does a discussion of "communion, order, and dissent" have to do with the well-known and well-loved children's story of Puss and Boots? Remember, in the story, the hero can only reach his goal if he listens to a despised cat that he must take as his companion on the way. It would seem that the point of the story is that attention must be given to what we might otherwise despise if we are to succeed in our more "high flown" endeavors. My point is that hierarchy, the subject of this conference, is an aspect of church...
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