"I was...surprised when a substantial majority declared the polity of the Episcopal Church to be primarily that of an autonomous and independent local church relating to the wider Anglican Communion by voluntary association. This is not the Anglicanism in which I was formed, inspired by the Oxford movement and the Catholic Revival in the Church of England."

Steenson said he was forced to reflect on the crucial text from Vatican II's Lumen Gentium which reads: "Many elements of sanctification and of truth can be found outside the Church's visible structure. These elements, however, as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, possess an inner dynamic toward Catholic unity."

The bishop said that if this was true, then what we say and do as Anglicans ought to be directed toward the goal of reunification with the Catholic Church.

"The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission strove valiantly to bring this about, and it once seemed that Anglicanism might offer itself, even sacrificially, for the sake of authentic Christian unity. It is much to be regretted that its 1998 report, 'The Gift of Authority,' has been largely forgotten in our present conflicts, especially its call for the re-reception of the historic ministry of Peter within Anglican life."

Steenson ripped the Episcopal Church, saying the church "had made a decisive turn away from those extraordinary efforts to preserve the Communion, such as Archbishops Rowan's proposal last summer in "The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today." It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Episcopal Church has rejected the discipline of communion but wants it only on its own terms."

Steenson said "others in the Anglican Communion have taken it upon themselves to establish a separate provincial structure to challenge the Episcopal Church, some even arguing for a re-formed Anglicanism without reference to the See of Canterbury.

"The Windsor Report calls for a future Anglicanism governed by strengthened instruments of communion and covenant, but the strong medicine of primacy, so necessary to Catholic order, is missing from its prescriptions. In none of these choices do I find that 'inner dynamic toward Catholic unity'. It doesn't appear that one can get there from where we are now, at least not corporately, considering Anglicanism's present configurations."

Steenson wrote: "From time to time it seems necessary for some to embark on these personal journeys as a reminder that the churches of the Reformation were not intended to carry on indefinitely separated from their historical and theological mooring in the Church of Rome. I believe that the Lord now calls me in this direction."

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