Religion: Intercommunion Squabble

“I’ve never heard of a report of such import for the church being accepted with so little argument,” said a stunned Anglican canon last week. The Convocations of Canterbury and York, traditional arbiters of all doctrinal matters in the Church of England, had just accepted, with little dispute, a report recommending extension of “limited intercommunion” with the Church of South India. The argument was not long in coming, and with it the threat of a schism in the Anglican Church.

The union of some 1,000,000 Methodists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and members of the Reformed Church into the Church of South India in 1947 was a notable feat of theological tightrope-walking, as well as the first major attempt to unite Episcopal and non-Episcopal Protestant churches. The Church of England, which claims that its bishops are successors of Christ’s apostles, insisted that all ordinations after the union be performed by Episcopal bishops, but agreed that no reordination would be required of those who had already been ordained in non-Episcopal churches. Said the Canterbury-York report on recommending intercommunion: “We consider that there are no longer any grounds for hesitancy in accepting as valid in intention the consecrations and ordinations of the Church of South India.”

Suspect Bishops. Strong Anglo-Catholic elements in the Church of England, led by a group of priests called the Annunciationists (after the Church of the Annunciation in London), thought differently. Many ministers in the Church of South India were not ordained validly in the beginning, they argued. Furthermore, ordinations performed by the 13 Episcopally consecrated bishops of C.S.I, since 1947 are also invalid because the bishops were in communion with nonconformist clergymen. The Annunciationists also charged that the C.S.I, refused to accept the Christian creeds in entirety, pointed to a clause in the C.S.I, constitution in proof: “The uniting churches accept the fundamental truths embodied in the creeds . . . but do not intend thereby to demand the assent of individuals to every word and phrase of them.”

“Such a church,” said the Rev. Hugh Ross Williamson, an Annunciationist leader and playwright, “cannot be called a Christian church in any hitherto definable sense of the term . . . After today, it will be impossible to be certain that any ordination in the Church of England is valid. This is not just another crisis. It is a unique happening which is bound to have historical consequences.”

Suspect Orders. Then Father Williamson intimated that many Annunciationist priests (his estimate: 1,700 to 2,000, a figure that Anglican sources claim is grossly exaggerated) might be forced to secede and join the Roman Catholic Church. Reason: “That we may, by continuing to hold to the faith, represent the true Church of England, and that if we seek reconciliation with the Holy See we may end, historically speaking, the schism which took place under Henry VIII.”

Nobody really expected that it would come to that, especially since the Roman Catholic Church does not recognize the validity of Anglican orders. In any case, intercommunion at present allows members of the Church of South India only limited privileges and local bishops may use their discretion in granting even these. The question of full intercommunion is not expected to become a serious question for about two decades.