English Prelates Feel Peers Pressure
Episcopal News Service. October 17, 1996 [96-1586]
Leanne Larmondin
(ENS) "Primate attacks English Bishops" screamed the front-page headline in the Church of England Newspaper.
The primate being the Primate of Canada, the Most Rev. Michael Peers. The story was about a letter the primate wrote to the paper lambasting an English bishop for adopting an 18th-century "colonial" attitude towards the American church.
Peers was responding to an article in the paper by Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, general secretary of the Church Missionary Society and assistant bishop of Southwark. In an article on the Righter case in the United States, Nazir-Ali fired a warning shot from the far side of the Atlantic across the bows of the American Episcopal church to uphold the church's traditional teaching on homosexuality.
"The phenomenon of people in English palaces issuing 'warnings' to other people across the Atlantic about positions they must hold, as well as about the consequences of failure to do so, has a ring oddly reminiscent of the 1770s," wrote Peers.
In a previous issue, Nazir-Ali wrote about the court's judgement in the case of retired Bishop Walter Righter, who was accused of violating church doctrine for ordaining a non-celibate homosexual.
"The Anglican Communion, as a whole," wrote Bishop Nazir-Ali, "is looking to the Episcopal Church and its various bodies to uphold the traditional teaching of the church in the areas of sexuality and of the life of the church's ministers. A failure to do so will certainly influence the course of the next Lambeth Conference" (in 1998).
"Many in the other provinces of the Communion will be concerned that a North American agenda should not, once again, dominate a worldwide conference...."
Every 10 years, the Lambeth Conference brings together the bishops of the Anglican Communion. The first Lambeth conference was held in 1867 after the Provincial Synod of the Church of Canada urged the Archbishop of Canterbury to bring together Anglican bishops serving overseas to discuss issues facing them around the world.
In his letter to the Church of England Newspaper-- which was printed under the line "Will you English never learn?" -- Peers said that English bishops might be interested to know that the Canadian House of Bishops, in preparing for Lambeth, expressed concern that the Lambeth agenda "not be hijacked again by English issues and procedures." Peers concluded the letter saying, "If this is to be the style of England's contribution to Lambeth 1998, then I dread the event already."
The newspaper criticized Peers in an editorial, calling his comments "puzzling."
"It's a bit rich when a white Canadian describes the views of Pakistani-born cleric, and a second generation convert from Islam, as colonial," said the paper.
However, the editor conceded that "the fact that the Lambeth Conference takes place here does not mean that the agenda, procedures and character of the event should be English. Neither should it be dominated by the North Americans."
Meanwhile, following on the heels of Archbishop Peers' controversy, a second primate voiced similar concerns that the worldwide Anglican community needs to be "less English" at its international meetings.
Speaking in Brazil at a regional preparatory conference leading up to Lambeth, Archbishop Glauco Soares of Lima, primate of the Episcopal Church of Brazil, reminded Latin America's bishops that, of the world's 70 million Anglicans, more than 50 percent live in non-English-speaking countries.
The Latin American bishops called for debate at Lambeth on issues central to the churches of developing countries, such as foreign debt and access to land.