(Updated)
Thinking Anglicans provides news of the Church of England response to the draft Anglican Covenant:
Press Release
The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, as Presidents of the General Synod, have submitted a Church of England Response to the draft Anglican Covenant published last year for discussion around the Anglican Communion.
All Anglican Provinces were invited to comment on the text prepared by the Covenant Design Group chaired by the Archbishop of the West Indies, the Most Revd Drexel Gomez.
…
The text of the response has been overseen by the House of Bishops’ Theological Group and builds on the earlier work of the Faith and Order Advisory Group. The draft response was discussed by the House of Bishops in October and by the Archbishops’ Council in November.
The Covenant Design Group will be meeting at the end of January to consider all Provincial responses. A ‘take note’ debate on the Church of England response to the Anglican Covenant is planned for the General Synod in February 2008.
Here’s the text of response (rtf format). The response is an extensive examination of the covenant. One comment of many:
An important question that is raised by this Preamble is what is meant by the phrase ‘the Churches of the Anglican Communion.’ Are the churches of the Anglican communion, properly so called, the thirty eight national bodies that belong to the Communion or are they the dioceses of the Communion gathered round their diocesan bishops? This is not just a theoretical ecclesiological question, but also a practical one since it raises the question of whether the bodies that should subscribe to the Covenant are the national bodies or the dioceses.
Update at 5pm. The BBC has a story. An excerpt:
The Church of England has made clear its disapproval of Anglican provinces which intervene in the affairs of other churches without authorisation.
In a document it said such interventions should not take place except as part of “properly authorised schemes of pastoral oversight”.
Update at 8pm. Tobias Haller has a reading here.