Evelyn Waugh, waspish convert to Rome and satirical novelist, once said that he could believe that the church was defined by communion with the Pontiff, or that the classical Protestant position could be right in that the church had gone off course and needed radical reform in the light of the Bible at the Reformation.The Anglican Communion in the West is reaping what was sown in the 19th Century by liberals of at very best questionable social preferences in high church garb who wanted to Romanize the Church of England without actually submitting to any other authority than themselves.
What he could not believe as a theory was the Anglo Catholic view, that the true church was revealed as a small group of homosexual curates in 19th Century Oxford! That of course is a wicked remark, but it has a haunting resonance for this Lambeth Conference and its obsession with homosexuality and to a lesser extent women bishops.
http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=8732
They re-interpreted or threw out the Anglican formularies -- Scripture, the 1662 BCP and the 39 Articles -- in order to try to get the Anglican system to buy into their vision, and in doing so opened the door for the further liberal depravities that we see today.
Their spiritual offspring lives on today not only in the liberal Episcopal Church and Church of Canada, where homosexuality is now a "sacrament" (a beloved Anglo Catholic term, along with non-BCP terminology like "Mass", "Eucharist" and "Holy Orders"). It also lives on in the bizarre proliferation of self-proclaimed "continuing Anglican" churches, which are neither "continuing" nor "Anglican" but are rather small pseudo-Romish sects with Bishops everywhere and no submission to any authority but themselves.
Vagante delenda est.
