When the Anglican Communion started to unravel in 2007, following the Archbishop of Canterbury’s unexplained decision to invite the American bishops to Lambeth 2008, even before the deadline for their compliance with certain restraints imposed by the primates, and the subsequent attempt to pretend that the ‘deadline’ was nothing of the kind, Bishop Mouneer [Anis] stood out as someone who was not prepared to break with the central organs of the Communion.
Unlike many other primates from the developing world, he continued to believe that the processes envisaged by the Windsor Report (2004) and the proposed Anglican Covenant, sponsored by the Archbishop of Canterbury as the answer to the Communion’s incoherence as an ecclesial body, were good and necessary solutions to the church’s problems. Accused of being naive by some of those who went on to form the FCA, Bishop Mouneer stuck by Rowan Williams and became one of his strongest backers. His public statements are full of praise for him and often quote him at some length, a degree of devotion which must make him virtually unique in the Anglican world.
Alas, Bishop Mouneer’s reward for this extraordinary loyalty has been meagre. At one point he specifically asked the ACC to hold back on a statement it was going to issue because he was on a pastoral visit elsewhere in the Middle East and would not have time to consider it until his return to Cairo. He was ignored, and the ACC went ahead without him, making only the shortest of apologies when it realised that it had caused offence. Dr. Williams, who seems to have all the time in the world for Ms Schori, never rushed off to Cairo or showed any public concern for Bishop Mouneer’s position. He could not ignore the bishop’s resignation of course, but his official statement was perfunctory in the extreme and betrayed no sign of any sympathy for the reasons which compelled him to leave.
Bishop Mouneer could easily have camouflaged his resignation in the way that people often do. He could have pleaded the burdens of office or the dangers of stress and ill health. He might even have said that it was time for someone else to take his place, and pretended that he was stepping down in order to give others a chance. He did none of those things.
Instead, he told the truth….
I’m not finding the article at the link.
http://www.churchsociety.org/churchman/documents/Cman_124_2_Editorial.pdf
I find a greater significance that ++Mouneer is also in authority over Jerusalem and the Middle East. It is also significant that the first meeting of GAFCON/FCA was in Jerusalem and their statement is the Jerusalem Declaration.
Jerusalem is the birthplace of the Church and always will be the spiritual and geographical epi-center of the Church, not Rome. Isaiah states that furnace (of sacrifice and of the refining fire) is in Jerusalem. The very name, Jerusalem (Jah-yireh-shalom) means worship/adoration of God, who shoots (or issues forth) God’s peace and all blessings. Jerusalem is the symbol of the Church and our nurturing mother.
In the early church, though her domain and power was small, Jerusalem was accorded a supremely honored place among the patriarchs. ++Mouneer is small of stature, but great of faith and intellect…and in a spiritually-powerful position that few can grasp.
For Canterbury to breech the trust of ++Mouneer and the relationship with Jerusalem, is significant and symbolic indeed of the breech between the Canterbury and GOD Himself.
It is a serious matter that England/Canterbury, indeed, the Western Church must resolve or die.
“Dr. Williams … has already reached the point where no-one of any integrity trusts him or believes a word he says, and how much longer can that go on?”
It is indeed a sobering statement, particularly for a scholarly journal, of how the present incumbent of the Archishopric, despite all efforts to dissuade him, has deliberately taken actions that have caused things to deteriorate to such a degree.
Its amazing that many of those who claim not to be revisionists and who claim, directly or indirectly, to support “…the Faith once given…” cannot see “the handwriting on the wall.”
That handwriting has been examined and cross-examined and parsed and unparsed and it keeps saying the same thing.
And that same thing is that the Anglican national churches in the industrialized nations have been, aggressively and in a hostile manner, pursuing the disassociation of their Anglican episcopacies from “…the Faith once given….”
And, they are rapidly replacing “…the Faith once given…” with s secular and a politically-correct belief system that is not based upon “…the Faith once given…” but on a belief system that is derived from the left-wing fringe of political thought that has so badly damaged world society over the past two hundred years.
This includes the damage caused by the extremes of the French Jacobins, the Napoleans, the Kaiser Wilhelm/Bismark, the Russian communists, the German national socialists, the Red Chinese, etc.
This damage has included more than the killing of millions upon millions of human beings created by God, it has been an attack on any religion or philosophical belief system that stands in the way of the far-left fringe calls ‘progress.’
Gee, I guess that that is where the term “progressivism” comes from. And it means the aggressive and single-minded distruction of religions and belief systems that ‘get in the way.’ Quite often the far-left fringe achieves this destruction through an intial co-opting of the leadership of what it seeks to destroy.
Wow! Does this explain the revisionists’ behavior? Does this explain the motitvation of so many of our bishops?
Not sure why you lumped the Kaiser and Bismark in with that rogue’s gallery, AnglicanFirst.
Reply to evan miller (#6.).
Because, starting with Otto von Bismark, the new German state created under his auspices a society that met many of the grievances being used by the socialists of his day in order to ‘pacify’ a ‘thirst’ for socialism that had been created among rank-and-file German industrial workers.
This over two generations or so led to a German state that was able to enlist the cooperation of the German industrial workers in the imperial ambitions of Kaiser Wilhelm and his ilk which led to an enthusiastic mobilization by most levels of German society to take that German society to war in World War One.
When WW I ended, it didn’t end with finality in Germany. Consequently, when Hitler and his ilk appealed to rank-and-file German workers, they were able to fan the flames of what Bismark had started in the mid-1800s and convert the energy of those flames to support that uniquely German form of radical socialism that was unabashedly called national socialism. The rest is history.
By the way. If one follows the immigration routes of the latter part of the 1800s in the USA, one can find areas in the industrial midwest where Bismark’s ideas regarding socialism as seen by the rank-and-file worker are still strongly supported.
[Some off topic comments have been removed – Elf]