Transcribed interview (courtesy of Marilyn):
Saturday, June 20, 2009
From here – 17-21 minute mark.
Interviewer: Roger Bolton, BBC Radio 4
(Roger Bolton) Now a new church will be set up tomorrow with the coming together of traditionalist Anglicans who have broken away from the American Episcopal Church (ECUSA) and the Anglican Church of Canada over their liberal stance on homosexuality.
The Anglican Church in North America will hold its inaugural assembly in Bedford Texas where it will unite some 100,000 Anglicans from 700 and 28 dioceses into a single church. The current bishop of Pittsburgh, Robert Duncan, will be installed on Wednesday as its new Archbishop.
I spoke to him earlier and asked him if he and his new church wish to remain part of the Anglican Communion.
(Duncan) Absolutely! We’ve stated our willingness and indeed as our Provincial Council meets in session tomorrow night in preparation for our provincial assembly, we’ll take a resolution that expresses our complete readiness to sign the Anglican Communion Covenant and our commitment to “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” which is what the Church of England in its formularies has always shared with the whole world. We stand at one with that. The Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada are having great difficulty holding to what the mainstream of the Anglican Communion and the mainstream of the Christian Church hold to. The Communion will have to sort it out.
(Roger Bolton) Do you have any indication from the Archbishop of Canterbury that he will welcome your church into the Communion?
(Duncan) What we have is an openness. The Archbishop of Canterbury and I are in regular contact. He is determined, and has asked my permission, to send one of the Pastoral Visitors and Santosh Marray, one of the Pastoral Visitors, will be welcomed here into our Provincial Assembly. He will be here to listen and to observe.
(Roger Bolton) But it is right to say at the moment you have not been invited by the Archbishop of Canterbury to join the Anglican Communion.
(Duncan) Well, it is actually the case that the Archbishop of Canterbury has invited us to submit as a province a request to be considered by the ACC for admission as a province. That offer was actually made early in the course of this year in preparation for the ACC meeting in Jamaica. The Archbishop and I were in conversation and I shared with him that our intention was not to do that for Jamaica but to do that on the basis of the Anglican Covenant since that would be a fairer basis to assess us.
(Roger Bolton) Did the Archbishop indicate either that he welcomed your application and secondly that he would support it?
(Duncan) Well what he did, and I think the verb that he used was that he encouraged our application.
(Roger Bolton) So would you expect that when the next Lambeth Conference comes around in nine years time that you would be there?
(Duncan) If there is a Lambeth Conference in nine years time, I’d be very surprised not to be there – along with my colleagues here in the US and Canada.
(Roger Bolton) You sound to me as if you might be somewhat surprised if it actually takes place. Do you think that the future of the Anglican Communion as present constituted is still in doubt?
(Duncan) Oh, I think that the present structures of the Anglican Communion are under great strain and are unlikely to endure in their present form into the 21st century.
(Roger Bolton) That was Robert Duncan the current Bishop of Pittsburgh, later this week to become Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America.
