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Painful Lambeth 2022 reality: Anglican bishops cannot 'walk together' to their altars

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Painful Lambeth 2022 reality: Anglican bishops cannot 'walk together' to their altars

While Canterbury is urging Anglicans to keep "walking together," the 2022 Lambeth Conference demonstrated that many of the Anglican Communion's bishops can no longer even receive the Eucharist together.

Doctrinal conflicts over biblical authority and sexuality have raged for decades, with growing churches in the Global South clashing with the shrinking, but wealthy, churches in England, America and other Western regions. During this 12-day conference, which ended Sunday (August 8), conservatives from Africa, Asia and elsewhere declined to receive Holy Communion with openly gay and lesbian bishops. Several provinces -- including the massive Church of Nigeria -- boycotted Lambeth 2022 altogether.

"For the large majority of the Anglican Communion the traditional understanding of marriage is something that is understood, accepted, and without question, not only by bishops but their entire church," said Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, in a mid-conference address. "To question this teaching is unthinkable, and in many countries would make the church a victim of derision, contempt and even attack."

Bishops in the Anglican minority, he added, "have not arrived lightly at their ideas. … They are not careless about Scripture. They do not reject Christ. But they have come to a different view on sexuality after long prayer, deep study and reflection on understandings of human nature. For them, to question this different teaching is unthinkable."

Throughout Lambeth 2022, the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches -- representing about 75% of Anglican church attendance -- pushed to reaffirm a 1998 Lambeth resolution that "homosexual practice" is "incompatible with Scripture," while also urging Anglicans to "oppose homophobia." It stressed centuries of doctrine that "sexuality is intended by God to find its rightful and full expression between a man and a woman in the covenant of marriage, established by God in creation, and affirmed by our Lord Jesus Christ." That earlier resolution passed with 526 votes in favor, 70 opposed and 45 abstentions.

Writing to Lambeth participants, Welby said the "validity" of that resolution "is not in doubt" and that the "whole resolution is still in existence."

However, the archbishop did not allow a vote on the issue and he said he would not, as requested by Anglican primates in the past, discipline the unorthodox. Welby's team consistently tried to focus attention on "restorative justice," Christian unity and global warming -- such as a photo-op with bishops planting a tree at Lambeth Palace.

Rosenthal refused to remain silent

During his decades as a New York Times correspondent, the late A.M. Rosenthal saw lots of dead bodies in Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Kashmir, India and other troubled lands.

One day in Calcutta he started asking questions: What if some of these people are dying, but not yet dead? Was he supposed to help them? These questions stayed with him when he returned home to become an editor.

"I devoted a great deal of my time and thinking to wondering: When is it a sin to walk past a dying person? What number does God have? Is it one? Is it two?", asked Rosenthal, in a BreakPoint radio interview after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.

What if we know that torture is taking place, but cannot see the evidence with our own eyes or hear it with our own ears? Does God forgive those who don't act? "Is that what God is saying: 'If you can't see them, it's OK to walk away from them?' Or is he saying, 'If you can't hear them?' Suppose you can hear them, but not see them, or they're around the corner. When is apathy a sin?"

Rosenthal kept these questions to himself as his career soared. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter he covered the world and, as editor, he caused a journalistic earthquake when he pushed for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. For 56 years Abe Rosenthal helped change the New York Times and, thus, helped shape his times.

After leaving the editor's desk in 1986, he began writing his “On My Mind” op-ed columns in which he championed the human-rights causes that dominated his life -- free speech and freedom of conscience. Rosenthal was a secular Jew and an old-fashioned liberal from the Bronx, but many of his old questions about liberty, sin and apathy began to break into the open and affect his work.

"Abe fought to cure our blind spots and it worked," said Pulitzer Prize-winner Nicholas Kristof, speaking at Rosenthal's May 14 funeral at Manhattan's Central Synagogue. "He did indeed teach us to see."

The healing process wasn't painless, especially when Rosenthal latched onto one particular religious issue. Some human-rights activists are convinced that one of the reasons he lost his column and was forced to leave the Times was because he wouldn't stop writing about the persecution of religious minorities around the world.

Rosenthal couldn't understand why so many journalists just didn't "get" that story. I talked to him several times about this issue, in part because Jewish conservative Michael Horowitz sent him a copy of a 1996 column that I wrote about the slaughter of Christians and animists in South Sudan and the rebirth of the slave trade.

Rosenthal said he asked some newsroom colleagues this wasn?t a big news story. No one had a good answer. He ended up writing -- in one year alone -- 20 columns about the persecution of Christians, Buddhists, moderate Muslims and other religious minorities in human-rights hot spots around the world.

"You don't need to be a rabbi or a minister to get this story. You just need to be a journalist. You just have to be able to look at the numbers of people involved and then look at all the other stories that were linked to it," he told me, at the end of that year. "Why are journalists missing this? ... I am inclined to believe that they just can't grasp the concept of a movement that includes conservatives, middle-of-the-road people and even some liberals. Their distrust of religious people -- especially conservatives -- is simply too strong for them to see what is happening."

With his columns, Rosenthal helped pave the way for the passage of the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act of 1997 and the creation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Now, that hard-to-label coalition that fought for justice in South Sudan is, with a jolt of Hollywood star power, rallying support for the peace process in Darfur, where Islamists are attacking other Muslims.

Rosenthal refused to keep quiet. After his death, a Time editorial underlined the importance of a key Rosenthal statement about the Pentagon Papers: "When something important is going on, silence is a lie."

That's a great quote, one that perfectly explains why Rosenthal was so driven to write about religious persecution.

When believers are dying, silence is a lie.