A gentle rebuke for two of his fellow Primates along with a powerful plea for Anglican unity was delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, in his opening presidential address yesterday to the 11th meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council.
The 70-member body of bishops, clergy and laity representing the 38 autonomous provinces or churches in the Anglican Communion meets every two or three years between meetings of the Lambeth Conference, the gathering of all the world's Anglican bishops held every 10 years.
The occasion was the controversy aroused by Bishop Richard Holloway of Edinburgh, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, a tireless advocate of gay rights. In his recently published book, God- less Morality, he has argued in favour of leaving religion out of moral questions.
In reaction, Archbishop Moses Tay of Singapore, who was invited to the ACC as one of the five members of the standing committee of the Anglican Primates' Meeting, refused to turn up. In a letter to Dr Carey and his fellow Primates announcing this, he accused Bishop Holloway of making "horrendous and heretical statements".
"The heart of his concern," said Dr Carey, "which I know is shared by some, is that the [Anglican] Communion is deviating from its traditional roots of faith. I don't think that is true for a moment."
At the same time, Dr Carey expressed his disagreement with Bishop Holloway's central thesis that God must be left out of the moral debate. Certainly, in history some parts of the church had operated on the basis of fear by claiming divine authority for its commandments and prohibitions with eternal punishment for those who disobeyed, and some sects even today continued to operate on this basis, he said.
"But surely to conclude that we must turn our back on scriptural insights and teachings, the body of doctrine in the church formed over the years, and theological learning is an unacceptable option for us," Dr Carey went on. "If there is such a thing as a `godless morality', it cannot be a fully formed Christian morality, even if there is a significant overlap."
Dr Carey repeated the powerful plea for unity within the Anglican Communion he made in April in a lecture delivered in Charleston, South Carolina, and the warning he gave then against unilateral action. "No one has the right to take decisions which affect the whole," he said.
"The moment the `local' - and this is good Catholic and Anglican theology - wrests decisions from the whole, it is engaging in division. No diocese should take unilateral action which impairs the life of the whole province in which it is set . . . No province should take unilateral action which affects and impairs the whole Communion. That only denies the nature of communion and declares that in reality we are no more than a federation of independent churches. That clearly is not our ecclesiology, and we have to say soo, again and again and again.