During the weeks leading up to the recently concluded Lambeth Conference, an approximately decennial meeting of Anglican primates, the rector of St. Edmund\u2019s Episcopal Church, San Marino, California, to which I belong, saw fit to insert in the weekly worship leaflet a history of the conference in four short installments. Written by the Reverand Christopher L. Webber, a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, the capsule history made interesting reading, perhaps especially for this cradle Catholic and former Jesuit.<\/p>\n
One learned that the initial impulse for the Lambeth Conference only came in 1867 and then from Canadian Anglicans uneasy over their country\u2019s evolution toward independence from Britain. If Canada became fully independent, would the Church of Canada, against its wishes, be forced to become the Canadian equivalent of the Episcopal Church in the United States? Reluctantly, the archbishop of Canterbury agreed to hold a meeting, but he insisted that it would seek only \u201cbrotherly counsel and encouragement.\u201d\u009d At the second Lambeth conference, in 1888, a starchy resolution underscored this determination not to slide into a quasi-papacy: \u201cThere is no intention whatever on the part of anybody to gather together the bishops of the Anglican Church for the sake of defining any matter of doctrine.\u201d\u009d The principle of unity proper to Anglicans was to be mutual forbearance such that \u201cthe duly certified action of every national or particular church…should be respected by all the other churches.\u201d\u009d The archbishop of York, citing the Acts of the Apostles, reminded the conference tartly that differences among the churches began with Peter and Paul.<\/p>\n
During the twentieth century, however, the issues of divorce, remarriage, intermarriage, contraception, and the status of women in the church-all of which fell plausibly within the avowedly pastoral purview of the Lambeth Conference-replaced almost completely such classic doctrinal issues as the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist in determining whether one was or was not a communicant in good standing. Thus, when the 1900 conference ruled that only the \u201cinnocent party\u201d\u009d to a divorce might be readmitted to Communion after a civil marriage, it did tacitly claim a right to determine who was an Anglican. And since bishops attended the conference only at the invitation of the archbishop of Canterbury, a personal authority seemed to accrue to him to declare whether a given church was legitimately Anglican or not.<\/p>\n