THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury’s Anglican Covenant is not scheduled to be implemented until 2015, the Presiding Bishop of the Middle East and Jerusalem reports.In a statement released following the Feb 29 to March 4 meeting of the joint standing committee of the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates, Bishop Mouneer Anis of Egypt stated he had “lost many of the hopes” he had had for preserving the Anglican Communion from collapse due to delay, obfuscation and mendacity.
A member of the primates’ joint standing committee, he described an institution trapped in a culture of bureaucratic inertia that saw “conversation” as an end in itself.
Bishop Anis said he was “shocked” to hear from the staff of the ACC the Anglican Covenant would not be enacted until 2015.
This “gives the impression that we are not in a state of crisis and that there is no desire to move towards a solution. In my opinion, if we wait until 2015 or even 2012 the Communion will be fragmented,” he wrote.
Bishop Anis also expressed frustration saying that while “we emphasize the importance of listening, very little time” was actually given over to addressing the contentious issues threatening to destroy the Communion.
These were “pushed to the last day of the meeting,” he noted, adding that he had expected there would have been “constructive listening and discussion,” but was sorely disappointed.
He also objected to the dilution of the clear requests of the primates and the ACC for action. “I was also very surprised that some now speak of the ambiguity of the Windsor recommendations and the meaning of ‘moratorium’.”
The Windsor Report was a “very good example” of this problem. “These recommendations were affirmed during the Primates meeting in 2005, everyone waited for TEC and Canada to respond.
TEC’s responses were unclear and the Primates at Dar es Salam requested a clear response by September 30.
The response was clearly inadequate as Archbishop Rowan mentioned in his Advent letter. What action did we take or recommend in the JSC meeting? The answer is nothing.”
In a statement released through the Episcopal Church’s press office, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said there had been a failure to communicate.
"We functioned in English but that does not mean we are still speaking the same language," Bishop Schori said. "It's not just American and British English, but also its usage around the Communion, and I wonder if that might not be a source of difficulty in our conversation, certainly in some of the responses the Joint Standing Committee has had to address from particular provinces around the Communion."
Different parts of the Communion had interpreted the Windsor Report differently, she suggested due to differing understanding of language.
“There has been an assumption that in some parts of the Communion it means x and the faithful interpretation in other parts of the Communion that it means y or z."
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