The rise of the African church could have made Canterbury an important player in international relations\u201d\u201dnot exactly a rival to Rome (Catholicism\u2019s one billion adherents make that unlikely) but at least a second European center with which Africans would have felt a relation and to which they could have looked for intellectual and ecclesial authority.<\/p>\n
Instead, hardly anyone notices when the archbishop of Canterbury is about to be replaced and the unity of Anglicanism is about to be shattered. The job of the archbishop of Canterbury has always been something of a high-wire act, delicately balanced between the Protestant impulses of the church on one side and its Catholic impulses on the other side. And, from time to time, various archbishops have lost their balance (notably when John Henry Newman slipped away to Catholicism in the battles over the Oxford Movement in the 1840s).<\/p>\n
This time, unfortunately, it is the wire itself that is breaking….<\/p>\n