Dublin primates meeting marks an ‘end to the communion as we know it’

February 3, 2011
by George Conger

A meeting of the leaders of 23 of the Communion’s 38 provinces has produced a draft agreement diminishing the primates’ role as an instrument of unity for the Anglican Communion. The primates meeting is to be restructured into a pan-Anglican fellowship for conversation, with a goal of “acknowledging diversity and giving space for difference” within the church, according to a ‘working document’ released at the close of the Jan 24-30 meeting in Dublin.

The reforms put forward by Dr. Williams and the Dublin primates have abandoned the calls for discipline and good order made by the primates since the 1997 Jerusalem meeting, conceding there is not political will to take action against the Episcopal Church. It also follows upon the revamping of the Lambeth Conference as a teaching instrument for bishops in 2008, the controversial 2009 ACC meeting that torpedoed the Anglican Covenant process, and the creation in questionable circumstances of an all powerful Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion last year.

Dr. Williams has now effectively gathered the authority once held by other instruments of the communion into his own hands, and into those of a London-based bureaucracy. the rest