Williams ’set to be manipulated’: CEN 8.17.07 p 4. August 17, 2007
Posted by geoconger in Archbishop of Canterbury, Church of England Newspaper, House of Bishops.trackback
THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury’s Sept 20-21 meeting with members of the US House of Bishops in New Orleans will seek to manipulate Dr Williams into giving the Episcopal Church a clean bill of health so as to preserve its place in the Communion.
Conservative American leaders claim the Episcopal Church will seek to resurrect a report presented to the February Primates’ Meeting prepared by a small group within the Joint Primates-ACC Standing Committee that said the Episcopal Church had met two of the three requests of the Windsor Report and deserve a reprieve.
The meeting will be used to “manipulate” Dr Williams, the Bishop of Fort Worth, the Rt Rev Jack Iker said on July 31. The leaders of the American House of Bishops believe “If we can talk to Rowan, face to face, we can convince him of the rightness of our position and that he will stand with us,” he said.
Bishop Iker noted this scenario was not unrealistic. “As you will remember the subgroup report that initially came to the Dar es Salaam meeting, which nobody else had seen but presumably Rowan Williams had seen, tried to give the Episcopal Church pass marks on whether we complied with the Windsor Report recommendations or not,” he said.
The US Bishops will seek to “revive that subgroup report” and come out of the New Orleans meeting with Dr Williams “validating” that position.
At the June meeting of the US Church’s Executive Council, the Bishop of New Westminster, Canada, the Rt Rev Michael Ingham, urged the US church to use its time with Dr Williams constructively and get him to listen.
Dr Williams’ March meeting with the Canadian bishops, he said, had been structured so that while Dr Williams was given time to speak to the Canadian bishops, the bishops were not allotted time to speak to Dr Williams.
The Episcopal Church’s New York office has announced that the two-day meeting with Dr Williams will be closed to the press, and have released no details on how the time will be organised.
The Bishop of Quincy, the Rt Rev Keith Ackerman stated that past Bishops’ meetings conformed to a “well manipulated system.”
The Bishops would “meet in small groups, reporting back but never hearing the results of the reporting back” and the bishops would be kept busy “by talking about any number of subjects.”
With this “mechanism in place, whoever is handling the process will get precisely what they want,” he said.
Comment at Thinking Anglicans or Standfirm.
If only it were true that he could be manipulated by them. As soon as he was appointed, Williams gave assurances to anti-gay and anti-women priests that he would stand by them, giving the impression that he would take the shape of anyone who sat on him. It now seems that he has been fixed in that shape, and no attempt to change him by the American bishops will have any effect. It seems to me to be likely that if the Holy Spirit had been active in his appointment, then it was to install a liberal at Lambeth. He has sadly failed to live up to this calling.
If Archbishop Williams does take the atypical stance of supporting TEC after his meeting with the HoB, it will probably be primarily because he has been treated so shabbily by the dissenters and their overseas supporters – those to whom he has bowed and acceded ever since his enthronement.
They have called him “lost” and “unneeded”, so why should they now be surprised if he finally abandons his unfortunate support for such fickle and unfriendly friends?
On September 30 the Primates of the Anglican Communion – most of them – will serve the ultimatum to the ECUSA. So the timing is excellent. Stakes are high. Who knows what Rowan will do; what truths he has discovered in his Sabbatical? I hope they send the Windsor Report back to the drawing rooms Harold
+Rowan is made of sterner stock than this. No one is going to manipulate him for a moment. Voices of fear before the fact are surely not godly. Let us pra and wait and see.