No Longer Catholic
07/17/2006
By Gary W. Kriss

Most of the commentary on the recent General Convention has focused on the impact its decisions will have on the relationship of The Episcopal Church with the rest of the Anglican Communion. However, this observer believes that, behind these major decisions, something else was going on at General Convention — something that is in some ways more subtle, but quite possibly far more important, at least for Episcopalians of a catholic disposition.

General Convention cannot speak for Anglicanism as a whole, but its actions on several fronts indicate very clearly that the leadership of this portion of the Anglican Communion, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, now regards our church unequivocally as a protestant denomination. In truth, this is nothing new, but General Convention 2006 has put an exclamation point on it.

The clearest statement of this attitude is in the establishment of interim eucharistic sharing with the Methodists [p. 6], which our ecumenical officers expect to lead to full intercommunion in the not-too-distant future. We already live with the doubtful proposition that our arrangement with the Lutherans can somehow be shoe-horned into compliance with the terms of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, but there is no way that the Methodist episcopate can be equated with the historic episcopate as defined in the Quadrilateral. As Christians we are obligated to work for unity. But as Anglicans we agreed long ago that we must do so in a way that does not sacrifice a gift, the historic episcopate, which we managed to preserve even in the darkest days of the English Reformation. That was our position, but it is no longer.

This mindset is evident in other actions. The famous Resolution B033 is a call to “exercise restraint,” but clearly it is not the moratorium the Windsor Report asks for. Furthermore, as soon as the voting was over, a substantial bloc of bishops announced they would not abide by the resolution in any case. Their position is clear: We are not all integral members of the mystical body of Christ; we are, each one of us individually, free to act as we choose, without reference to any other. Ecclesiologically, we are, plainly and simply, a protestant sect. the rest