One can almost hear some Catholic prayers:

"Dear Lord, please keep the Anglican Communion together. We don't know what to with sexually active married priests."

Not only do the Anglican Communion appear to benefit from "fudges", the same "fudges" enable others to keep their peace and not be confronted with the untenability of their paradigms.

How does Catholicism benefit from Anglicanism? A priest who cannot be sexually celibate, can still remain "Catholic" within the Anglican Communion.

If the burden of Catholicism is too high, they have no right to complain if others relieve their donkeys of their burdens, or readjust the load to something they can safely manage. Moses would be proud.

I would think the Catholic church might be concerned for a reason opposite the one mentioned in the article. Sure there will be some conservative Anglicans fleeing to Rome. But a number of Episcopalians I know are former Catholics fleeing sexism and homophobia and general stupidity about all matters related to gender and sexuality. If the Anglican Communion splits and our part of it is finally free to be inclusive, welcoming, and empowering for women and LGBT people, and not having to fight those battles also free to apply the power of the gospel to other matters of justice and peace, there will be more RCs making their way to us.

Although I have sharply criticised ++Rowan on different occasions I don't do so here and think that he is actually a relatively straightforward and sincere person.

I don't think he's hidden anything but neither has he rushed in to lead the Communion where it might not (yet) be ready to go.

History will of course judge but the question is how do you facilitate a *process* around the Communion that allows the differeing considerations on human sexuality to proceed prayerfully and charitably (unlike at Lambeth 1998).

I think people are reading ++Rowan wrong. They are seeing him compromise his core beliefs in a dishonest way. I see rather that he is at the undoing of violence against LGBT people on a far larger scale by allowing a process to happen across the whole of the Communion instead of allowing the whole thing to go up in smoke and allowing large numbers of Provinces to come into being whose sole defining characeteristic is the rejection of gay people.

Maybe it ill work, maybe it won't, but it's a very daring and spiritual attempt.

I want to reaffirm what Phyllis said: since anti-LGBT Anglicans make so much noise and get so much press, they are what the world hears about.

Any number of pro-LGBT RCs I've spoken with, just don't see enough DIFFERENCE between the RCC and the Anglicans, to make the switch ("better the devil we know" they say).

Craig, I think you've hit the nail on the head with your so perceptive article - above.

The denigrators of the ABC are from both camps - so the probablity is that he is doing something right. His personal integrity cannot be impugned, and anyone who has read his prodigious output in serious theological discoursec would admit to his grasp on things spiritual, as well as physical.
Remember, even the patriarchs Peter and Paul didn't always get things right.

The task of Primus-inter-pares is very different from that of the Pope - who has absolute rule over the teaching of his Church. The Anglican Church, however, has no effective 'magisterium', to dictate what one must believe in order to attain to salvation. Perhap this is her weakness. However, there is a particular biblical passage which may help us to grasp the present seeming insecurities in our Church: "In your weakness, I am made strong". Patriarchalism can no longer rule as an absolute in the Church. 'The Holy Spirit of God moves as she wills'.

How can someone willing to say they believe something they do not have any integrity? I don't think Williams has either integrity or credibility.