Moscow in warning to Anglican Communion

Monday, 25th August 2008. 7:30am

By: George Conger.

GAYS and women bishops could wreck relations between the Church of England and the Moscow Patriarchate, the Russian Orthodox Church reports.

On July 28 Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria, the Russian Orthodox Church’s representative to European institutions met with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams and his secretary Canon Jonathan Goodall during the Lambeth Conference to discuss the state of Russian Orthodox–Anglican relations.

In a report printed last week, Moscow said that its representative told Dr Williams of its distress over the July decision by General Synod not to provide legal safeguards for traditionalists opposed to the consecration of women bishops. The consecration of women bishops would be an “additional obstacle” to Orthodox-Anglican dialogue, Bishop Hilarion told Dr Williams, adding that such a move would exclude “even the theoretical possibility of the Orthodox churches acknowledging the apostolic succession” of Anglican bishops.

Moscow reported that Bishop Hilarion also shared his Church’s disquiet over the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. The 2003 consecration of Bishop Robinson had led the “total curtailment” of relations between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Episcopal Church after 150 years of dialogue.

“The representative of the Moscow Patriarchate expressed the hope that a similar event would not be repeated in the Church of England and that the Anglican Communion as a whole would continue to support traditional standards of Christian morality, as expressed in the Gospels and the writings of the Church Fathers,” the Moscow statement noted.

A third area of concern, Bishop Hilarion said, was the participation of the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church in Anglican-Orthodox talks. Moscow has objected to the inclusion of the Estonian Church --- which broke away from Moscow with the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch following the collapse of the Soviet Union --- in ecumenical dialogues with the Anglican Communion and Roman Catholic Church.

Moscow “would be forced to leave” any meeting where the Estonians were present, Bishop Hilarion said.

While couched in stronger, more direct language, Moscow’s concerns over the future of inter-church relations mirror those of the Vatican. In addresses to the bishops at Lambeth, three Catholic cardinals urged the Anglican Communion to set its house in order and warned that gays and women bishops could wreck ecumenical relations with Rome.

Dr Williams assured the Russians of the Church of England’s desire for continued fraternal relations with Moscow and welcomed its participation in future Orthodox-Anglican talks.

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Russian Orthodox Church denounces Church of England

Friday, 1st August 2008. 3:06pm

By: George Conger.

The Russian Orthodox Church has released a statement denouncing the Church of England, calling the July 7 vote by General Synod not to create legal safeguards for opponents of women bishops an abandonment of the true faith.

The decision taken by General Synod "alienates Anglicans from the Orthodox Church and contributes to further division of the Christian world,” the Moscow Patriarchate said in a statement released on its website on Aug 1.

The Moscow Patriarchate stated that it opposed the ordination of women to the priesthood as “such a practice contradicts centuries-old Church traditions dating back to the first Christian community. Orthodox Christians consider women bishops to be even more unacceptable," the statement said.

Tradition and the common witness of the church through the ages forbad any single church from taking a unilateral step in consecrating women. Bishops were the “direct spiritual heirs of the apostles” who had been given a “special blessing to lead the people of God and a special responsibility to maintain the purity of the faith and be symbols and guarantors of the church’s unity.”

The decision to permit the consecration of women was driven not by theological considerations, but by political correctness, Moscow said, “in our view, the decision of the General Synod of the Church of England” was “not dictated by theological or practical church needs, but by a tendency to follow the secular idea of sexual equality in all spheres of life."

This concern to appease the spirit of the age was unwise the Russian Church argued. The “secularization of Christianity” in an “unstable world” had led many “believers to abandon” liberal churches to seek refuge in those Christian traditions founded upon an “eternal and constant God” and possessing “firm Evangelical and apostolic traditions.”

On July 30, Cardinal Walter Kasper sounded a similar theme, telling the bishops at the 2008 Lambeth Conference “the ordination of women to the episcopate effectively and definitively blocks a possible recognition of Anglican Orders by the Catholic Church.”

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Anglican Bishops world conference in UK is likely to result in the church schism

21 July 2008, 10:09

London, July 21, Interfax - The world's Anglican bishops or the so-called Lambeth Conference opened their once-a-decade summit this weekend in Canterbury, England.

About 200 bishops are boycotting the forum as they protest against liberal tendencies in the Anglican community.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams opened the gathering and greeted all its participants and observers from the Roman Catholic Church, local Orthodox Churches and various Protestant denominations.

Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and All Russia conveyed his message to the forum. He said that all its participants "bear great historical responsibility," as they have to "decide between traditional, Biblical interpretation of Christian morals and the tendency, which takes sin and permissiveness for demonstration of love and tolerance."

According to the Russian Church primate, decisions taken at the Lambeth conference "are extremely important for the entire Christian world as further relations between Christian Churches and Anglican community largely depend on them."

Outcome of the Lambeth Conference is especially meaningful for the Russian Orthodox Church, the patriarch said, as the history of its contacts with Anglicans dates back to the 16th century and "was traditionally warm and full of mutual understanding."

The Lambeth Conference runs to August 4 and observers believe is can result in schism of the Anglican Church.

"Anglican Community is on the verge of splitting. In fact, the schism has almost formed and two hundred lacking bishops is eloquent of it," Russian Orthodox Church observer Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria told an Interfax-Religion correspondent.

According to him, many Anglican bishops from Africa, including all Nigerian bishops, decided to boycott the Lambeth Conference to show their protest against liberal tendencies in the Anglican Church.

"Anglican schism reflects the situation in the whole Christian world. Polarization between traditional and liberal versions of Christianity becomes more definite and today the Anglican Church is to decide between the two options," Bishop Hilarion said.

"Unfortunately, he concluded, the choice has been made and recent decision of the Anglican General Synod to consecrate women-bishops proves it."

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Lambeth: Archbishop says truth not held by any one party

Catholic hope for US traditionalists More

‘Efforts must be made to preserve integrity of Church’ More

Sunday, 20th July 2008. 10:00am

By: George Conger.

Canterbury: Truth is not the possession of any one party with the church or a single denomination, but can only be found through sustained dialogue with one another, the Archbishop of Canterbury said in an address to bishops and ecumenical participants attend the 2008 Lambeth Conference on July 19.

Warming to theme of the necessity of dialectical engagement with opposing viewpoints within the church, Dr Rowan Williams telegraphed his hopes for the Lambeth Conference, and the Anglican Communion — asking the bishops to hold together and in unity share in the search for the divine.

While his terms of reference were to the ecumenical movement, the message of unity through collective engagement was not lost upon the Anglican bishops gathered under the conference marquee at the University of Kent. Whether Dr Williams’ programme for church union can be sustained through the life of conference, however is unclear, as conservatives press for a resolution to the divisions of doctrine and discipline from within the church, while the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches have pressed Dr Williams to set his house in order.

“If we are not yet one as we hope and pray to be,” Dr Williams said, “Perhaps it is because we have not yet gone deep enough. We have not yet together sunk into that bottomless well of God’s love and God’s promise.”

“When we meet together as Christians …we do so in the hope of being taken into the depths. Launch out into the deep says Jesus to his disciples. Launch out into the deep of God’s own love, the deeper you go there the more you will discover unity in the heart of God from which the eternal word springs out,” he explained.

This meant that the “greater our union with our neighbour, the greater our union with God. The deeper into God we move, the deeper is our communion with our neighbor. The deeper our communion with our neighbor, the deeper our immersion in the bottomless well of God’s being,” the archbishop said.

Dr Williams stated the ecumenical participants at Lambeth were “not just guests” but “sharers of our work together” whose different traditions and theological viewpoints would “provoke us further in that endless journey of love and discovery toward that perfection” of the divine.

Whether the Anglican Communion’s dialogue partners will have the patience to wait while this journey unfolds is also unclear. In a letter of greetings to the conference, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State wrote the “ecclesiological questions which form the framework of your deliberations are a reminder that ministry conferred by ordination is bound by the apostolic faith handed down from the beginning and by the 'regula fidei' faithfully transmitted, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, through the ages.”

In a carefully phrased critique of recent theological innovations and ecclesial practices within the Communion, Cardinal Bertone said: “Our different understanding of the divine plan for this ministry in the Church is one of the issues which the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission has been addressing for the past 40 years. New issues that have arisen in our relationship pose a further and grave challenge to the hope for full and visible unity that has been the long-standing goal of our joint ecumenical endeavour.”

Alexy, the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia was blunt. “The topic of Christian morality, linked with that of gender, is high on the agenda of the present Lambeth Conference,” he wrote.

“There is intense debate about these issues among Anglican bishops, clergy and laity. It seems to me that members of the conference have a very serious task: they have to choose between the traditional, biblical norms of morality and tendencies which consider sin and general permissiveness as manifestations of love and tolerance. That is why there is laid on members of the conference such a great, historic responsibility.”

Continued relations with the Russian Church and the Orthodox world were on the line at Lambeth, he said. “The decisions you will take today are of immense importance for the whole Christian world, for on them, in many ways, depends the future of the relations of many Christian churches and communities within the Anglican Communion. The outcome of the Lambeth Conference will have particular importance for the Russian Orthodox Church, for the history of our contacts with Anglicans goes back to the 16th century. As a rule it has been marked by warmth and mutual understanding. I sincerely hope it will be possible to maintain such relations.”

The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was rather more circumspect, but offered the same message as Alexy, urging Anglicans to set their house in order.

“Living as we do in an age of anxiety, at a time of rapid change and sharp controversy, it is often difficult for us as bishops to exercise our diakonia in an unifying way.”

Bartholomew said the Orthodox were praying for a successful Lambeth, one that “will prove to be a council of reconciliation and unity, an occasion for speaking the truth in sincerity and without compromise, yet an occasion for speaking the truth in love.”

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Russians Slam Archbishop Rowan Williams

Church of England Newspaper
2/22/2008

The Russian Orthodox Church has slammed the Archbishop of Canterbury for his remarks over Sharia law, saying the head of a Christian Church should not be promoting the tenets of non-Christian religions.

While church leaders in Britain have rallied to his defense, Orthodox, Lutheran and Roman Catholic leaders abroad have been less charitable in their remarks. The Feb 7 interview with the BBC and his subsequent speech at the Temple Church on certain aspects of Sharia law, have elicited sharp comments from overseas Anglican and Christian leaders, while Dr. Williams' subsequent explanation, that his remarks were misunderstood, appears not to have appeased his critics.

Speaking to the opening session of the World Council of Churches' Standing Committee meeting in Geneva on Feb 14, the Russian Orthodox's representative to ecumenical organizations, Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria said "many Christians around the world are looking up to Christian leaders with hope that they will defend Christianity against all the challenges it faces."

"Our role is not to protect Sharia law, to glorify an alternative style of behavior or to preach secular values. Our sacred mission is to announce what Christ announced, to teach what his disciples taught," he said.

"Politically correct Christianity will die," said Bishop Hilarion. "We have already been watching the process of liberal Christianity's gradual decline as newly introduced moral norms lead to splits, discrepancies and confusion in several Christian communities," he said.

The head of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) told German radio on Feb 16 there must be a single law for all citizens, regardless of race or religion.

Dr. Wolfgang Huber, Bishop of the Evangelical Church of Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia and Chairman of the Council of the EKD said the premise behind Dr. Williams' remarks was flawed.

"Hoping to achieve integration through a dual legal system is a mistaken idea," Dr. Huber told Deutsche Welle. "You have to ask the question as to what extent cultural characteristics have a legitimate place in a legal system. But you have to push for one country to have one system."

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