Stand Firm: Canon Lawyer Raymond Dague’s response to the bishops’ report

From Stand Firm, a response to the bishops' report by Raymond Dague, an attorney in private law practice in Syracuse, New York, and the assistant chancellor to the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Albany:

Don’t be fooled by these six lawyer/bishops and their American church. This crisis is one of their own making, and try as they might, they cannot blame it on Nigeria, Rwanda, Pittsburgh, Fort Worth, or Canterbury. The buck for this crisis stops at 815 2nd Avenue in New York City, at Minneapolis in 2003 with the convention which blessed the consecration of an unrepentant homosexual priest and elevated him to be one of their bishops, and at Columbus in 2006 with a convention which ignored the worldwide outcry over Minneapolis, and did nothing but justify itself. The current crisis in the communion is not the fault of those of us who “reassert” the faith once delivered; it is the fault of those who are “reappraising” the faith once delivered, to use the terms coined by Kendall Harmon.

This Statement to the House of Bishops says that there is an “unwritten constitution” which governs the Anglican Communion. They get such ideals by saying that there is “international law” and they then analogize the relationships of Anglican provinces to the relationships of nations. Curiously though, Norman Doe, a leading canon lawyer for the Church of England, in his definitive work, Canon Law in the Anglican Communion: A Worldwide Perspective, fails to mention this supposed unwritten Anglican constitution or any analogy to “international law” which the six have discovered.

Doe finds scant evidence that any such communion-wide law exists. “Turning to the actual law of churches, however, there is little evidence of interprovincial law which expressly governs the relations of a particular church with other churches,” writes Doe, id., at p. 351-52. The various Lambeth Conference resolutions create a “quasi-legislation” but these resolutions have only moral and not legal effect on the churches of the Communion, according to Doe. What moral effect there is, such as 1998 Lambeth Conference Resolution 1.10, does the opposite of what these six bishops say. That resolution rejects “homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture.” It also declares “in view of the teaching of Scripture [a requirement for] faithfulness in marriage between a man and a woman in lifelong union, and believes that abstinence is right for those who are not called to marriage.”

Read it all.