The Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Rt Rev David Chillingworth answered questions at that church’s General Synod two weeks ago about whether or not the mortoria imposed on the Anglican Communion by the Primates a decade ago are still in effect.
Changing Attitude Scotland reports Chillingworth’s response to a question about the status of the moratoria in Scotland since that church rejected the Anglican Covenant.
The Anglican Communion Moratoria were established, I think, I’m now speaking from memory, by the Primates Meeting at its meeting in Dar-es -Salaam. And there were three Anglican Communion moratoria which were that we were asked not to elect or consecrate a bishop in a long-term same-sex relationship; not to establish authorised rites for the blessing of same-sex unions and not to take part in cross border incursions. Now the question really was whether the Anglican Covenant was seen as being what took the place of the Moratoria and nobody every answered that question. I have always had great uncertainty about moratoria – it goes back to my Irish past – of living with ceasefires. The problem with ceasefires is this: you establish a break in the conflict in order to stop the parties doing more damage to one another and that is an entirely understandable and laudable aim. But by doing that, you remove the urgency about resolving the issue. So having established the moratorium, everybody sits back because the need to resolve the issue is no longer there. And I think we’ve had too much of that. I don’t think there has been clarity about the link between the Anglican Communion Moratoria and the Anglican Covenant and I do not think at this moment there is clarity about the status of the Moratoria. My personal view is that the authority of such provisions ebbs away slowly as time passes and I don’t think that there is much authority left. And in the recent pronouncements of the Church of England, for example, the Anglican Communion Moratoria were not mentioned. So clearly they don’t seem now to be authoritative in our life and I don’t think they are a major factor in any consideration we give.
Later in the synod, the Primus added:
…the nature of the Primates’ Meeting has changed and the Primates’ Meeting I think, in the initial phases of the great difficulties which the Anglican Communion has passed through, went through a phase in which it tried to take decisions and hold the Communion to those decisions. When I attended the meeting of the Anglican Primates in Dublin in 2011 that meeting made a very definite decision to return to what it regarded as its core role as a place of prayer and consultation. Therefore it regarded the period in which the Primates’ Meeting had attempted to take authoritative decisions as being something of an aberration. So we are now left with a situation where a meeting functioning, a part of the Anglican Communion, functioning in one mode has left us with a set of provisions which it probably isn’t able to undo. But there’s another strand to that, because we obviously can ourselves decide that inasmuch as the Anglican Communion Moratoria are in existence we feel ourselves no longer bound by them.