Jonathan Clatworthy, writing on the “No Anglican Covenant” blog, analyzes the defense of the Anglican Covenant by Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, Director for Unity Faith and Order The Anglican Communion Office (ACO).
Pleading Guilty over the Covenant
By Jonathan Clatworthy at No Anglican Covenant blog
Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, Director for Unity Faith and Order at The Anglican Communion Office, has written a defence of the Anglican Covenant against recent criticisms. Here are her points, followed by a response.
The Standing Committee is not new
This hardly matters, but when a committee gives itself a new name and new powers, it’s at least debatable. More important, standing committees are usually committees of a larger body which wants a standing committee. This makes it rather odd that there should be a Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion, since the Anglican Communion has never said it wants one. (Unless you equate the Anglican Communion with the ‘Instruments of Unity’, but as Alyson is at pains to deny subordination I’m sure she doesn’t mean that.)
It is not that one Province would exercise a veto over another, but that there would be collaborative discernment.
If that’s all, then there’s no need for Section 4. It would also help if the Covenant’s proponents publicly declared that they had abandoned the proposals of the Windsor Report and were doing something completely different.
We’ve already had an excellent example of how the veto would work. Just think what happened over gay bishops. Some Anglicans approve of them, some don’t, others again are so strongly opposed that they have been threatening schism. The Windsor Report, Primates’ Meetings and the Covenant Design Group, instead of insisting that Anglicanism allows for differences of opinion, capitulated and agreed that the relevant appointments should not have taken place. The wording of the Covenant is designed to legitimate future such threats whenever objectors kick up a fuss ‘which by its intensity, substance or extent could threaten the unity of the Communion and the effectiveness or credibility of its mission’ (3.2.5). In effect, those who make the most convincing threats of schism will be enabled to hold the rest of us to ransom, as they have just done.