Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Why Lambeth is like a Hollywood set

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/indepth/articles/why_lambeth_is_like_a_hollywood_set/

[sydneyanglicans.net] 29 Jul 2008--Peter Jensen is hardly likely to thank the pewsitter for comparing him to Ronald Reagan. But the Archbishop is safely out of the country so let’s take the risk.

Maybe it was the actor in him, recognising the scent of pretence, but Reagan realised that the Soviet Union was a tottering edifice like a rickety stage set likely to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. All he had to do was give it a little push. The rest was history.

Jensen has very different politics to Reagan, and he doesn’t dye his hair, but somewhat like the president, Jensen has seen that the liberal dominance of the Anglican Communion is a Potemkin village, an elaborate camouflage that only serves to dazzle passing dignitaries.

British journalist Andrew Brown cheekily told a meeting of the Modern Churchpersons Union (the pewsitter has not made up the name) that the “malevolence towards the structures of the Anglican Communion started with the liberals. It started with you guys.”

Brown recounts that when Li Tim-Oi, the first woman priest, was ordained in emergency conditions in China during World War Two, respect for the Communion’s conventions (because that’s all they are) meant that she quietly returned to lay life. But when the Americans ordained women priests thirty years later, things had changed.

“The whole understanding of what constitutes obedience to God had shifted,” says Brown. “The old colonial church played by the rules. The new independent one ignored them, pointed out that they didn’t exist, they weren’t binding and so on and so forth.”

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