Do the Anglicans need a Pope?

By Geoffrey Kirk

The question of what, if anything holds together the Anglican Communion has recently become a painfully immediate one,' writes Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury in a new book 'Anglican Identities', a excerpt from which recently appeared in The Times. Dr Williams is joining a brave and distinguished company, from Garbett through Neil to Sykes, who have tried to make sense of a protean phenomenon.

The Times, unaccountably, gave the Williams excerpts the title 'Do the Anglicans need a Pope?' - a question the archbishop, understandably, does not ask. Dr Williams's own chosen title gives more of a clue to the contents. He is in search, not of an Anglican identity, but of 'Anglican Identities'. They are by no means the same thing.

An Anglican identity, if it could be tracked down, would describe the characteristics of a world-wide church with clear doctrinal parameters. Having described a core of what were, indisputably, 'Anglican Activities', it would then be possible to determine what were, in consequence 'Un-Anglican Activities'.

That is not the Williams way. His prose style (one of elegant and scholarly opacity), and his personality (one of studied ambiguity and charming contradiction) make him the quintessential Anglican. He does not see the need for an Anglican identity. Like Anglicanism itself, he is a living contradiction. He incarnates what our ecumenical partners find difficult to get on with

Though he has probably come to regret it, his statement announcing the withdrawal of Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading claimed that to appoint as a bishop one whose ministry many people both in the diocese and the wider church would be unable to receive, contradicted the role of the bishop as a focus of unity. And yet he remains as committed as ever to the consecration of women as bishops -with arguably far wider consequences for Anglican unity and ecumenical progress. It is presumably on the strength of both opinions that he recently kissed hands at the Vatican.

But in his somewhat post-modern attitude to catholic ecclesiology Rowan is a mere novice. The recently resigned Co-chairman of ARCIC, Frank Griswold, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States, on the other hand, carries the principle to extremes.

Committed, no doubt, as an ARCIC member, to the notion of eucharistic fellowship as the final expression of full visible unity, he was nevertheless (until they caught him at it), given to donning jeans and a cowboy shirt and receiving communion at a Catholic Church not far from his office in New York. In the recent crisis over the consecration of an actively gay bishop, he signed a statement by all the Primates of the Communion deploring such action, and then returned to the United States in order to act as chief consecrator himself.

Small wonder, then, that Cardinal Kasper has put the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM) on hold and that the Oriental Orthodox Churches have decided the 'the on-going dialogue would be better served by waiting, at present, for the Anglican Communion to take proper account of and reflect on the consecration which has taken place.'

It is clearer now than ever that dialogue with Anglicans is time wasted: for they can deliver neither consistently and nor internationally on agreements made. With Anglican Provinces busily excommunicating each other, and two provinces having already consecrated bishops to operate as 'missionaries' in the America province, it looks as though the 'waiting' will extend to the Greek Kalends.

Truth to tell it is hardly possible to overstate the acrimony and confusion which presently reigns in the Anglican Communion. Dr Williams has bought time by the usual ruse of setting up a Commission to assess the situation, with Robin Eames, the genial Archbishop of Armagh as its chairman. But we have been here before. Eames also chaired the Commission on Communion and Women in the Episcopate. It made recommendations which were almost universally ignored, and not implemented even in Eames's own province.

So how, you will ask, did things get like this?

The saga of the manufacture of modern Anglicanism is a fascinating one. Until relatively recently Anglicans relied for stability on what was called 'Hooker's three legged stool' - scripture, tradition, and reason. (There was a degree of chicanery in attributing the notion to Richard Hooker, who would never have agreed that its three elements ought to have equal emphasis; but no matter.) Provincial autonomy, in those days, was not a doctrine; it was an accusation.

In the seventies of the last century this idea was radically altered by giving the stool a fourth leg: 'experience'. Contemporary experience (the Zeitgeist) soon displaced reason, replaced tradition and became the criterion by which scripture was judged and found wanting. It was a wind that blew all hedges down.

For liberal Anglicans, who have effectively gained control of the first world provinces, the three-legged stool has subsequently given way to another trinity: the remarriage of divorcees, the ordination of women, and the blessing of same sex unions. These are taken to be self-evidently desirable 'developments'. That the three are inextricably linked and that they are a deliberate challenge to the authority of scripture and tradition is clear from the reasoning of even their most moderate proponents.

The now-famous Canon Jeffrey John, in his paper 'Permanent, Faithful, Stable' argues for the blessing of homosexual relationships on the grounds that they are no more contrary to scripture than other practices of the modern Church. "A faithful homosexual relationship is not 'incompatible with scripture', (certainly no more so than the remarriage of the divorced, or the leadership of women ...)."

It is an argument which shamelessly appeals to all those who have committed or condoned a scriptural infidelity to rally round and support further transgression. It leads, one need hardly say, to an horrendous but inevitable conclusion.

Nothing could be further from the scripturally based, systematically developed, traditionally grounded, rationally presented ethics of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, rooted as they always are in the core doctrines of the faith. The ethics of modern liberal Anglicanism are clever, brittle, adventitious and based upon special pleading. That the special pleading presents itself in the guise of self-evident truth merely adds insult to injury.

'Do the Anglicans need a Pope?' asks the headline writer, after an all too cursory glance at Archbishop Rowan's polished in-conclusions. The question bears no relation to the book the man wrote: but it is a perfectly good question.

And the answer? The answer surely is that if Anglicans wanted a Pope they would have invented one already. The genius of Anglicanism (a curious word I agree under the circumstances) has, on the contrary, been to shun and disparage any sort of regulative authority. The more, in recent times, Anglicans have spawned what are curiously called 'Instruments of Unity' - the Lambeth Conference of Bishops, the Anglican Consultative Council, the Primates' Meeting - the more they have wilfully asserted the autonomy of provinces, and even dioceses, against them.

The self-effacing fidelity to the Ordinary Magisterium, which compelled the present Holy Father to pronounce the ordination of women to the priesthood to be beyond the competence of the Church, would be simply incomprehensible to the majority of Anglicans. If Anglicans had a Papacy, ten to one they would use it finally to relativise scripture, debunk the tradition and so complete the systematic agenda on which they are presently engaged.

Geoffrey Kirk is Vicar of St Stephen's, Lewisham and National Secretary of Forward in Faith.