Word: communion
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...would-be Anglican rebels gathered with storm clouds brewing around them. But now, even though the conservative Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFcon) has not concluded its meeting in Jerusalem, the secession it threatened to bring to the 78 million-member Anglican Communion looks like a confused bust...
This all comes as a bit of surprise to the press, which - with ample encouragement from the Church's right - had been framing GAFcon as a decisive step toward schism in the Anglican Communion, the third biggest global religious fellowship. GAFcon seems to be falling apart on several fronts. First came the venue problems: the conference ping-ponged embarrassingly at the last minute from Jerusalem to Jordan and back to Jerusalem...
Then there was attendance. The clerics at GAFcon were really supposed to sit out the Communion's once-a-decade Lambeth Conference in July. But it turns out several key conservatives did not even show up at GAFcon (or simply made brief appearances) and will go on to the church-wide meeting in Canterbury in July. Meanwhile, conservative Southeast Asian bishops have fallen out with some GAFcon leaders. The conservative conference now seems reduced mostly to Africans and some first-world ideologues, not all of whom are as gung-ho as Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, the meeting's prime mover...
GAFcon's message was scrambled from the get-go. An opening statement by Akinola castigated "apostates" within the Communion and included the firebreathing line, "There is no more any hope, therefore, for a unified Communion." But he subsequently admitted in a speech, "We have no other place to go, nor is it our intention to start another church." Sydney Australia Archbishop Peter Jensen, a rising conservative, told reporters in Jerusalem yesterday that GAFcon "is a coalition of people who would not necessarily work together. Will it work? We don't know." Other speakers have been similarly vague...
Still, in the end, the Pope has not budged on the issue. The 2005 Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist held firm to the total ban for remarried Catholics who have not obtained an annulment. And Sunday, following Berlusconi's public request to his bishop, Benedict spoke about Communion to a gathering in Canada by video hookup. Though he didn't specifically cite divorce, the Pope said: "We must do all in our power to receive it with a pure heart." Again he offered his empathy for "those who cannot have Communion due to their situation," and urged them...