At 5:15 p.m. I was reading the House of Bishops and Deputies List \u201d\u201c a list-serv for members of those two General Convention houses \u201d\u201c when I came across a copy of a letter dated October 14, 2007 from Williams to Bishop John Howe of the conservative Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida. This letter was read to the Standing Committee of that diocese last Thursday (October 18), and released this afternoon.<\/p>\n
The letter was staggering in its misunderstanding of the polity of the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church and shockingly naive in its understanding of where most Episcopalians stand with regard to any interference in our own affairs by foreign Prelates.<\/p>\n
Perhaps more significantly, though, it is the betrayal of beliefs that Williams held dear for so long \u201d\u201c right up, in fact, to the point where he became Archbishop of Canterbury, when \u201d\u201c he says \u201d\u201c unity became his ministry.<\/p>\n
It is now clear that Williams is willing to abandon any individual and even whole Provinces of the Anglican Communion in the cause of \u201cunity\u201d\u009d.<\/p>\n
I say \u201cunity\u201d\u009d in inverted commas because it is not really unity at all, but the bowing of a misguided, naive, and incompetent leader to what one person has described as the \u201cBullydox\u201d\u009d of the Communion: those very narrow \u201cNeo-Puritan\u201d\u009d conservatives who wish to reinterpret Anglicanism to be something that is not the \u201clarge tent\u201d\u009d we are all so familiar with but a prison wherein they alone guard and define what is \u201cacceptable\u201d\u009d for others to believe.<\/p>\n
It is also clear that, having squeezed our House of Bishops in such a way that a significant part of our own Province has expressed outrage at their apparent abandonment by their own bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury has pulled the rug from under our Bishops\u2019 feet and invited acts of disobedience by dissidents in any Province of the Communion who disagree with any internal issue of that Province.<\/p>\n
In so doing the Archbishop of Canterbury has opened a Pandora\u2019s Box of problems that will almost certainly destroy the Anglican Communion as we know it.<\/p>\n