‘In moral terms, progressive Anglicans have abandoned natural law for positive law. In natural law there is a concern for final causes—Aristotle’s “that for the sake of which”; a goal, purpose, or final cause guiding an action, a telos—to explain the nature and structure of reality. In positive law there is a belief that the nature and structure of reality can be legislated, established by legal precedent (and positive law has been legislating against natural law since the sexual revolution). Hence progressive Anglicans in the Global North have followed the zeitgeist in abolishing distinctions between male and female, homosexuality and heterosexuality, reproductive system and digestive tract, treating them all as functionally equivalent.’
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The Archbishop of Cant
Michael Giffin, Quadrant Mar 11 2026
Given Anglicanism is the third largest Christian polity in the world behind Catholicism and Orthodoxy, many are wondering why the reception of Dame Sarah Mullally as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury has been muted. Her gender is part of the reason, of course, but even Rome did not break off ecumenical dialogue with Canterbury over women’s ordination. The deal breaker for Rome was the consecration to the historic episcopate of a practising homosexual in 2003, Gene Robinson, whose “marriage” to his “husband” in 2008 was followed by a “divorce” in 2014. In what can only be called tragic irony, ECUSA (The Episcopal Church in the United States) chose to exhaust its moral capital on the hill of feminism and homosexual rights, wilfully, with open eyes.