BRAZIL: Primate affirms Lambeth participation, calls on Communion to 'take a hard look in the mirror'
Episcopal News Service. February 20, 2008 [022008-04]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
Maurício Andrade, primate of the Episcopal Anglican Church in Brazil (IEAB) has said in a letter to the province that he regrets the news that five fellow Primates will be boycott the upcoming Lambeth Conference.
Archbishops Peter Akinola of Nigeria, Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, Benjamin Nzimbi of Kenya, Henry Orombi of Uganda, and Gregory Venables of the Argentina-based Province of the Southern Cone recently announced that they would not attend the once-every-10-year gathering of Anglican bishops set for July in England.
"We are seriously preparing ourselves in Brazil to participate in the 2008 Lambeth Conference because we are certain that this is the space for unity, and we know that unity does not mean uniformity," Andrade wrote in his message.
All of his fellow Brazilian bishops and their spouses "are in prayer while we await to meet and be reunited with brothers and sisters who live challenges and in different contexts from our own, knowing that we are united in God’s mission," Andrade wrote.
They are "preparing to share our lives, challenges, and experience of being a Church that lives in missionary expansion," he wrote.
"We intend to go to Lambeth open to dialogue, and to feel the presence of God guiding us as His people, breaking the bread that unites us in the Body of Christ, and expressing solidarity with the world in need of the Word of transformation and salvation," Andrade wrote.
The five Primates said they would not attend Lambeth in protest over the invitations extended by the Archbishop of Canterbury to all but one of the Episcopal Church's bishops. Akinola, Kolini and Orombi had all previously announced that they intended to boycott the conference.
Andrade wrote that he supports the invitation to the Episcopal Church, because the church "has been showing all of us an example of the path to unity and reconciliation, because they have met all the requests for visits that were made and answered all the questions that were posed."
"They have spent time, money, and energy to meet the primates’ requests, always with generosity and openness," he added. "I think we need to keep in mind that we are Anglican. We are seeing a disregard of our richness and our ethos, that is, autonomy of the Provinces."
Andrade, who attended his first Primates Meeting in February in Tanzania, also criticized the call for an Anglican covenant.
"The Anglican Province of Brazil has already spoken out against the creation of a new pact, because our way of being Anglican has already been defined in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral," he wrote. "We are not nor do we want to be a mere federation of churches. We wish to continue in communion with Canterbury, a symbol of our unity, as full members of the Anglican Communion."
Noting the Lenten call for prayer, meditation, forgiveness and reconciliation, Andrade wrote: "We need to take a hard look in the mirror and see what we are doing with the Anglican Communion."
"I think it is time to remember that we are a 'communion' and not simply a 'federation' of churches and that, therefore, we do not need a 'pact,'" he wrote. "What we do need is to deepen the communion beyond the search for power, domination, and control."
Andrade also noted in his message that he had spoken with Venables during the Primates Meeting in Tanzania about Brazilian Bishop Robinson Cavalcanti of the Diocese of Recife who was deposed in June 2005 and later replaced. Cavalcanti led a number of Anglicans out of the diocese to form another diocese and there have been struggles over the ownership of church property in the diocese.
Venables agreed in Tanzania to take the initiative of setting up a meeting of Andrade, Cavalcanti and himself in São Paulo in July 2007, Andrade wrote, "but nothing happened." Andrade noted that an announcement on Cavalcanti’s website says that Venables will come to Brazil for a pastoral visit with Cavalcanti and his clergy. "But I have received no message concerning this visit," he wrote.
"In view of facts of this nature we are forced to ask: Which path will we take? Who will hear us? How will we bear witness?" Andrade wrote. "These are serious questions that we need to answer for the members of the Church."