The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, said she was gratified by the panel’s conclusions. “The Joint Standing Committee report has recognized the hard work of the House of Bishops,” Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori said in a statement, “and that our responses reflect our repeatedly expressed desire to remain in full communion with the rest of the Anglican Communion.”
But a conservative member of the committee immediately took issue with the report, saying his input was not included.
“The response of the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church represents a superficial shift from their previous position,” the committee member, the Most Rev. Mouneer Hanna Anis, primate of the Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East, wrote in an e-mail statement. “Therefore I strongly disagree with the report.”
Committee members traveled to New Orleans with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the communion’s spiritual leader, to talk to the Episcopal bishops about the tensions in the communion.
The Joint Committee submitted its report to Archbishop Williams, and he has sent it to all the primates and members of the Anglican Consultative Council, a representative body of bishops, priests and lay people. They are to respond to the archbishop by the end of the month.
“This is one voice, and other voices need to come in and say whether the Episcopal Church has indeed satisfied” the primates’ demands,” said Canon James M. Rosenthal, spokesman for the Anglican Communion Office.
Even the NYT smells fudge. And they are pretty good at political sniffery, too.
I find this statement, which I have not seen anywhere else, curious:
I can hardly imagine a more tepid quote from the ACO spokesman.
ps
I suspect Canon Rosenthal will get his wish very shortly.
We have the acceptance of the ECUSA PB, a non-Christian who was permitted to write/edit the report, and the opposition of His Grace Bishop Anis who was not permitted to write/edit the report. Let’s hope that this Pride of Authorship (“The committee I sit on really really likes me”) comes before a fall.
Sounds like 815 called their buddies at the NYT to brow-beat them back into submission after their reporting of New Orleans.
“Panel Says Episcopalians Have Met Anglican Directive”
“Panel Says North Korea Has Disbanded Nuclear Program”