On curia

I note that the Pope has been complaining. Apparently the Belgian police are treating the thugs in the priesthood who abuse kids in Belgium like criminals. That tells us all we need to know about how curial and papal authority corrupt Christian ethics.

Meanwhile in Canterbury, Canon Kearon and Dr. Williams work on their "covenant" project which seeks to bring curial and papal authority to the Anglican communion.

I do not mean to suggest the Communion has thugs to protect -- yet. But once the curial and papal hierarchy model applies to the Anglican experiment, and it stops being a communion and becomes a (much smaller) church, the same moral decline is inevitable. So we can contemplate a day when the headline will be the archbishop of Canterbury decrying a police department treating an Anglican thug like a criminal.

We do not have to go there. It is possible to have a communion of autocephalous and autonomous churches. It is possible to have those churches polity reflect episcopal leadership and synodical government. That can be done in other than the industrialized world: both Sudan and South Africa manage it. We do not have to follow Rome's errors.

"No Anglican Covenant" is more than a slogan: it is a life line. The document is the culmination of the fantasies of those who would enthrone repression to create a polity in which they rule. No existing polity would have them rule. No polity that fails to enshrine male privilege as some sort of God given mandate could call these people men to control. So, instead we have the "Anglican Covenant" which is neither.


FWIW

jimB