Thunderstorm over anglican skies

Some 800 bishops and top representatives of the 78 million Anglicans worldwide are invited to the synod, which meets only every ten years, to chart the church's future course. There everything will come on the Tapetet, which piled up at rage with the conservative wing. The admission of women to the clerical ministry in 1992; the episcopal consecration of an avowed homosexual in the U.S. in 2003; now the yes to women bishops in the Mother Church of England: ever new hackles for the conservative wing. Again and again, ever more adventurous compromise formulas and crutch constructions were sought to prevent an end to church unity: so-called flying bishops or superbishops to deal with dissident congregations and parishioners who rejected liberal, homosexual or female bishops or pastors. With a new proposal, the Bishop of Ebbsfleet, Andrew Burnham, was quoted in the British press Wednesday: Catholic bishops who could minister to conservative Anglican parishes at Rome's behest – but still remain Anglican. All such models did not come to fruition at the General Synod in York. That the liberal majority made no further concessions to the conservatives, but remained determined on the question of women bishops, makes the traditionalists particularly bitter. After all, the number one and two in the church hierarchy, Archbishops Rowan Williams and John Sentamu, had argued for further compromises – presumably even against their own personal convictions. One last hope remains for the traditionalists: that in the legislative process now beginning, which will last several years, the necessary two-thirds majority will not be reached in at least one of the three houses of the synod, that of the laity – and that the yes to women bishops will be overturned after all. Martial are the words used by observers to describe what the honorary primate of the Anglican world communion, Williams, can expect in the coming days at the Lambeth Conference. His credit has been used up after the York defeat. The years-long dismantling of the liberal thinker, who has desperately and to the point of self-denial placed himself between all the chairs, could experience a dramatic showdown at his seat of office in Canterbury of all places. Nationally and internationally, opponents have already positioned themselves in recent weeks. Conservative Anglicans have long ventilated the threat of a new wave of migration toward the Catholic Church, as occurred by the hundreds in 1992 after women were admitted to the priesthood. At that time, even the number three in the English hierarchy, Bishop Graham Leonard of London, converted and became a simple Catholic priest. The Vatican and the Catholic Church in England can't be happy about the latest development – and even a possible influx of them. Not only does the possible inclusion of married clergy or even entire congregations raise difficult theological as well as organizational questions. In the past, Rome stressed that a mere rejection of women's priesthood was not enough for acceptance into the Catholic Church; what was needed was the entirety of the Catholic faith. In addition, he said, a conversion must be done individually, not collectively. But much more serious than such practical problems is the damage done to ecumenism by the recent decisions – as the higher-ranking objective. The papal ecumenical minister, Curia Cardinal Walter Kasper, who will also present the Catholic position at the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, called women's ordination a "break with apostolic tradition," with a practice that all churches of the first millennium would have observed. The Vatican sees it as "another obstacle to reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the Church of England" – two churches that were considerably close to each other theologically just a few years ago.