Statement on the Meeting of Anglican Primates (Tanzania, February 2007) and its aftermath.

"With anger and deep hurt" was my reaction to the publication of the Windsor Report. That was an instant reaction, on first reading the Report. Time has not diminished my feelings. The Windsor Report trivialised and marginalised the position of those who cannot accept the ordination of women, and in so doing marginalised Anglican Catholics across the Anglican Communion and in the enforced Anglican Diaspora. Expulsion, marginalisation and legal attacks have continued to be the routine reaction to those who oppose the ordination of women and who take the orthodox position on sexual morality.

Through a multitude of different steps, in meetings of Primates, meetings of a Panel of Reference, activities of “the listening process” and in debates and resolutions of myriad national, diocesan and local synods, orthodox Anglicans have been persecuted while their opponents made themselves impregnable.

When Archbishop Ramsay and Pope Paul VI made their commitment to unity, it was in the midst of a reforming Rome and an Anglicanism long committed to the search for unity. Both committed their churches to grow into unity, and that commitment was intensified when Pope John Paul II came as a pilgrim to Canterbury, and Pope and Archbishop knelt together before an ancient Book of Gospels enthroned on the Chair of Augustine. Here was one of the most powerful images of recent Anglicanism – a church in awe of its history, its tradition and its Gospel. It has proven an empty image.

I have waited this time before reacting to the latest unfolding of "the Windsor process" at the meeting of Primates in Tanzania. I have waited for "conservative" Primates to dissent from the Report, as has happened before. I have waited for Anglican leaders to react, especially those to whom the Primates have addressed themselves. And I have waited for those who should have been most hurt to express their pain. There has been no conservative dissent. There has been an outpouring of outraged animosity from The Episcopal Church. And among the persecuted, from Father Kirk of Forward in Faith to Bishop Duncan of the Network, there has been both joy and a gritty determination as they look to a ecclesial future that the Primates cannot deliver, and in which they might not survive.

Now I make these points:

• The ordination of women, especially as bishops, has now been entrenched without dissent by the Primates of the Anglican Communion.
  Profoundly unconscious that the question of women as presbyters and bishops has been closed by those churches that form the heart of "the church catholic", the Primates elevated the recently elected Primate of The Episcopal Church to their Standing Committee - the highest-ranking bishops in the Communion. Confronted with a woman Primate among them for the first time, and a woman who has consistently allied herself with those who deny the Incarnation of Jesus Christ along with any semblance of biblical-based morality, they had the option of refusing her a place at their table , or elevating her. In their elevation, they have ensconced an apostate woman archbishop at the heart of the Anglican episcopate, which once in its ordinals was described as an episcopate "of the Church of God", but which can now no longer sustain this claim. Long ago, wells on the sacramental plains were being poisoned. Serious doubts about sacramental life were introduced into the life of local churches as women whose priesthood was officially "provisional" were appointed. Now the springs in the high mountains, from which the wells are fed, are poisoned with them. Communion is achieved between bishops. In their collegial embrace of the female apostate, the Primates have made it impossible for any Anglican bishop who holds the catholic faith to be in communion with the Primates. The Communion has renounced its Catholicity at the final point of fracture - the unity of its episcopate.
• The Primates have entrenched in Anglicanism a doctrine of authority as an ephemeral democracy, rejecting the idea that there can be any source of authentic teaching in the Church.
  They find it impossible to admit to an authority beyond themselves. In their mutual claim to find truth in Scripture, they expose themselves to myriad conflicting interpretations of Scripture, and reduce truth to majority opinions and winning votes. Gone is any image of a Church that lives beyond them and in spite of them. Gone is a Church that teaches with authenticity the truths for which the Apostles died. Yet these images where once held by Anglicans, who had no doctrines but those of the whole church catholic. For these Primates and, I fear, for the synods and trusts and churches that elect them, sustain them and direct them, the appeal to an unbroken apostolic tradition has become a foreign cry. While objecting to a bishop openly living in sin (not a new condition in the life of the Church), they have admitted an apostate bishop into their ranks.

The Traditional Anglican Communion sets against this spiritually destructive confusion a vision of an Anglicanism faithful to God revealed in history in his Son Jesus. It proclaims, with the catholic creeds, the repentance and forgiveness of sin. It proclaims an apostolic presence that teaches with authority in a ministry committed by the Christ "until the end of time". The distance between our faith and that of the Anglican Primates is great and made greater by their latest meeting. This causes us nothing but grief, for the greatest obligation on us, from Jesus himself on the night before he died, is to be one - one with one another, and one with the Father and the Son.

I call on the Primates to look again at what they are doing: to abandon an experiment in democratised faith for a living faithfulness; to abandon a neutered priesthood for a priesthood open to the iconic presence of the risen Christ in its ministry; to fearlessly proclaim the sanctity of life and the family that nurtures it in place of a narrow obsession with sexual sin; and to re-enter the world of catholic Christianity, prepared to rediscover the source of divine truth committed to the Church.

Archbishop John Hepworth

Primate

Traditional Anglican Communion

22 February 2007