The publication of details from a private e-mail message sent by the Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Consultative Council to Episcopalian Louie Crew was a betrayal, according to Mr. Crew, a five-time deputy to General Convention from the Diocese of Newark and a former member of Executive Council.

“I shared the message with a limited number of trusted friends, one of whom betrayed me,” Mr. Crew told a reporter for The Living Church. “I have harmed an important leader in the Church and I deeply regret that.”

In the message, details of which were published on the internet by a British weekly newspaper, Church Times, Canon Kearon is quoted saying he shares some of the same concerns that Bethlehem Bishop Paul V. Marshall made public in an open letter sent Jan. 16 to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

“Our relationship to the one who is expected to be first in a world-wide college of bishops is distant, confused, and multiply triangulated,” Bishop Marshall wrote. “We are ceaselessly told by those who would destroy our church that the [Archbishop] endorses this or that crudely divisive action or position. Questions to Lambeth on these occasions are sometimes met with silence and sometimes with stunning equivocation. This distance, confusion, and triangulation ought not to be. Can the Archbishop of Canterbury not come to meet us just once at a regular or special meeting in any city he would care to name?”

In a related development, Anglican Journal, the national newspaper for the Anglican Church of Canada, reported that Archbishop Williams will make his first visit to Canada since he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002.

Archbishop Williams is scheduled to lead a full-day retreat for the Canadian House of Bishops April 17. Archbishop Williams will arrive in Niagara Falls, Ont., in the evening on April 16 and leave after the retreat concludes. The bishops’ April 16-20 spring meeting is significant because they will be choosing candidates for a successor to Archbishop Andrew Hutchison. The election of a new Canadian primate is scheduled for June 22, midway through the Anglican Church of Canada’s triennial General Synod.

“He is a brilliant theological thinker whom we want to have access to,” Archbishop Hutchison told Anglican Journal. “I anticipate he’ll give a series of addresses that the bishops will be reflecting upon.”

Although political subjects won’t be on the agenda for the House of Bishops’ April 17 retreat, Archbishop Hutchison said, “there are mealtimes and coffee breaks” at which such discussions might take place.

Steve Waring

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