Archbishop Carey: TEC Likely to ‘Clean Out’ Conservatives

April 17, 2009
The Most Rev. George L. Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991-2002, offered a sober and sometimes bleak assessment of the Communion’s future and had challenging words both for the Instruments of Communion and The Episcopal Church on April 16.

Archbishop Carey was the keynote speaker at “Anglicanism: A Gift in Christ,” a two-day conference of the Anglican Communion Institute and the Communion Partner Primates, Bishops and Rectors at St. Martin’s in Houston. The title of his address was “Holding Fast and Holding On, The Instruments of Communion.”

Archbishop Carey began by tracing the history of the development of the Instruments of Communion: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the primates’ meeting. Each one, he argued, developed primarily in response to some crisis within the life of the Communion and a desire on the part of the members to develop unity through interdependence.

This trajectory toward greater interdependence existed until 2003 when “the Episcopal Church of the United States, by ordaining Gene Robinson, against the strong advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the moral authority of Lambeth ’98, [and] the appeals of the primates’ meeting, led the Anglican Communion into the worst crisis it has ever faced, and from which it is unlikely to recover.” the rest