Catholics who keep up with Anglicanism may have observed that the whole thing seems to be visibly coming apart.<\/p>\n
On the one hand, at June’s rally of the world’s conservative Anglicans in Jerusalem — the Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON) — over a thousand conservative leaders declared their willingness to work outside the official structure and indeed to intervene in the errant Western Anglican churches in defense of their marginalized and oppressed conservatives.<\/p>\n
On the other, over 200 conservative bishops, mostly from Africa, simply refused to attend late July’s Lambeth Conference, the decennial meeting of the world’s Anglican bishops, because the bishops of the Episcopal Church — who, by ordaining an openly fornicating homosexual bishop, had thumbed their noses at the rest of the world’s Anglicans, and the Christian moral tradition to boot — were seated with full voice and vote.<\/p>\n
Of particular interest will be the fate of the small Anglo-Catholic party, the wing closest to Catholicism in doctrine and devotion, now found almost entirely in England and the English-speaking former colonies. It was once, in the 1920s and early 1930s, the most creative and effective party in Anglicanism, but has kept declining since.<\/p>\n