The Lambeth Conference communications department released a 111-page booklet titled “The Principles of Canon Law Common to the Church of the Anglican Communion” prior to the start of a press briefing July 26.
 
The purpose of the book is “to stimulate reflection on what it is to be a Communion of ordered churches seeking to live out the Anglican tradition in a world of intensely rapid communication,” said Canon John Rees, convener of the Anglican Communion Legal Advisors’ Network and legal advisor to the Anglican Communion. Canon Rees responded to questions from the media after the booklets were distributed.
 
“If we are going to be able to continue to work together in response to God’s call and for the good of God’s world, as those who have taken part in these deliberations passionately hope, then we need to keep faith with out Anglican heritage, doctrinally, liturgically and structurally,” he said, reading from a preface to the booklet. “These principles are an attempt to map out what the main legal themes of that inheritance might look like, when some of the peripheral local detail is stripped away.”
 
The decision to investigate common law among Anglican churches originated in a series of conversations between then-Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey and Professor Norman Doe, principal secretary for International, Ecumenical and Anglican Communion Affairs. In March 2001, the primates’ meeting authorized an investigation as to whether there is an unwritten common law shared by the member churches of the Communion. All the primates were asked to nominate senior legal advisor who could attend and 30 lawyers, representing 17 partners, developed about 50 principles.
 
An eight-member drafting team has been meeting sporadically. The team includes Philippa Amable, chancellor of the Diocese of Ho in the Anglican Church of Ghana; David Booth Beers, chancellor to the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church; Robert Falby, chancellor for the Diocese of Toronto in the Anglican Church of Canada; Bernard Georges, chancellor of the Church of the Indian Ocean; Rubie Nottage, chancellor of the West Indies; Canon Rees; Fung-Yi Wong, provincial registrar of the Anglican Church of Hong Kong; and the Rev. Canon Gregory Cameron, secretary to the legal advisor’s network.
 
“What this is attempting to do is to get an overview of all of it and say we can deduce from what we’ve looked at that there are these principles which must underlie these individual laws,” Canon Rees said. “This is not the covenant and it is not a code of law. These are the principles of law which we’ve deduced. You certainly can’t just go along to a court and read it off. I mean by that it is no prescriptive. You can’t just take and enforce it as a rule of law that is directly applicable. We are not saying that this is the way the law should be because we know that in some provinces they don’t have a law like this. It’s also not the last word.”
 
Canon Rees said that 66 bishops attended a self-select session Friday. He reported a very good response among the bishops, however several members of the media had concerns about some sections. One person was surprised that under Principle 49 the only sources of “the faith of Our Lord Jesus Christ” were “taught in the Holy Scriptures, summed up in the Creeds, and affirmed by the ancient Fathers and undisputed Church Councils.” This section also mentioned the Apostle’s Creed and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, but did not mention tradition, reason or other early Church sources.
 
Others questioned subsections of Principle 52, one of which states that “ministers are called to work together and remain in fellowship so that visible communion is maintained even if theological or other disagreements occur.” Another subsection immediately following states “the right to deny the authenticity of the ministry of anyone duly authorized by a church belongs only to the competent ecclesiastical authority as designated by law.”
 
Principle 80 notes that property is held in trust by local church leaders as stewards for the national church. Principle 13 states that “no church, or any authority of person within it, shall intervene in the internal affairs of another church without the consent of that other church given in such a manner as may be prescribed by its own law,” and Principle 12 notes that “each autonomous province has the greatest possible liberty to order its life and affairs, appropriate to its people in their geographical, cultural and historical context, compatible with its belonging to and interdependence with the church universal.”
 
There is currently no Communion-wide juridical body capable of enforcing any of the principles contained in the booklet. In response to a question, Canon Rees denied that the Faith and Order Commission proposed by the Windsor Continuation Group on July 25 would assume that role.
 
Steve Waring
 
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