Magic Statistics

The Anglican Church in Australia may become the second Anglican province to alter its constitution to enable a split with the Church of England. Some Australian Anglican leaders are impatient with what they see as the Church of England’s slowness in resolving the divisions within the Anglican Communion over ordination of homosexual clergy and same-sex unions. The Australian newspaper reports:

A motion to be considered by the [Sydney] diocese's annual synod next Monday says recent developments within the English church relating to same-sex relationships may make it desirable to modify the Australian church's constitution to make the traditional link optional.
. . .
[The motion] will be put by Sydney solicitor and leading Anglican layman, Robert Tong. "There is little doubt that the Anglican communion faces a crisis," he said. "Instead of an automatic linking with the Church of England in England, it will be a matter of giving the Australian church a choice."

Last month, the Anglican Church in Nigeria amended its constitution to remove mention of ties to the Church of England. "All former references to ‘communion with the see of Canterbury’ were deleted and replaced with another provision of communion with all Anglican Churches, Dioceses and Provinces that hold and maintain the ‘Historic Faith, Doctrine, Sacrament and Discipline of the one Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church."

Here's another angle on the motion to be presented to Australian Anglican leaders:

Mr Tong is one of two Australians appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to a 13-member panel of reference set up in May to handle disputes over authority within the worldwide Anglican church.

The panel, headed by the former Anglican primate of Australian, Peter Carnley, met for the first time in mid-July in the UK and is scheduled to meet again in May, but it has not yet been allocated any matters.

That the panel of reference has not yet been given any cases to consider, despite numerous appeals made to the Archbishop of Canterbury regarding episcopal oversight, also has traditional Anglicans scratching their heads.

No doubt this contributed to Nigeria’s decision to remove constitutional ties to the C of E. Now Australia is about to ponder the same action. What is it going to take for Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to take this crisis seriously? Is he really just going to sit by while the worldwide Anglican Communion slowly unravels?

via titusonenine.

Baroness Margaret Thatcher celebrated her 80th birthday today. Even the Queen, who rarely attends personal celebrations of current or former prime ministers, joined the festivities. Lady Thatcher transformed British politics for the better: the free-enterprise-oriented political philosophy that guided government policy during her 11 years as Prime Minister almost immediately came to be accepted by all three major British political parties. Count the current British PM among her admirers. As the BBC puts it, "Tony Blair almost glows when he is compared favourably to her . . ."

It's one of those charming ironies of the modern world that, in this era of stridently leftist feminism, the ideological—doctrinaire, even—Conservative Lady Thatcher has emerged as the most successful female politican of modern times.

On a personal note, the StatWife and I lived in Oxford, UK, for a year while Lady Thatcher was PM and had the distinct pleasure of voting for John Patten, Conservative MP, Oxford West & Abingdon, in the general election of June 1987, which Lady Thatcher and her Conservative Party won handily. (UK election law allows Commonwealth citizens who have resided in the country for six months to vote.) It was probably the most personally satisfying vote I have ever cast.

A quote of the day from writer Melvyn Bragg. He continues:

[Hindsight] is corrupting and distorting and pays no respect to the way life is really lived - forwards, generally blindly, full of accidents, fortunes and misfortunes, patternless and often adrift. Easy with hindsight to say we would beat Napoleon at Waterloo: only by a whisker, according to the honest general who did it. Easy to say we would win the Second World War: ask those who watched the dogfights of the Battle of Britain in Kent in 1940. Easy to say the Berlin Wall was bound to fall. Which influential commentator or body of opinion said so in the 1980s? Hindsight is the easy way to mop up the mess which we call history; it is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled. As often as not, when the dust was flying, no one at the time knew what the outcome might be.

Source: Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: 500 AD to 2000, The Biography of a Language. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, pp. 39-40.