In a speech on Saturday, Bishop Tom Wright said the Archbishop of Canterbury was “writing to those bishops who might be thought particularly unsympathetic to Windsor and the Covenant to ask them whether they were really prepared to build on this dual foundation.” The notion being that if they are not so prepared they should not attend the Lambeth Conference. “Those letters, I understand, are in the post as we speak, written with apostolic pain and heart-searching but also with apostolic necessity.”
This was a curious reading of the Archbishop’s Advent Letter, as Simon Sarmiento has pointed out. But now we have this from Jim Rosenthal of the Anglican Communion Office: “No additional letters have been sent to anyone at this point.”
Bishop Wright has, at a minimum, jumped the gun. It is also possible that he has no idea how the letters are written–though he certainly makes it sound as though he does–or to whom they will be sent. Do the consecrators of Gene Robinson get letters? Or does John-David Schofield?
Perhaps we can all agree to refrain from further statements of purported fact (and self-serving analysis) on this point until we know what we are talking about.