ANGLICAN POPE?

Ted Olson reports it may be in the works (quotes from the London Times):

"The Archbishop of Canterbury will be granted sweeping new powers under secret proposals to force rebel Anglican churches into line," the paper reports. "The planned changes in church law would give Dr Rowan Williams the power to intervene in the affairs of churches outside England for the first time since the Church was established by Henry VIII. The proposals, which would have to be agreed by the Church's separate provinces, have already aroused suspicions that they will turn the Archbishop into an Anglican version of the Pope."

The Times says this was a written proposal discussed during the primates' meeting, not something created since then in response to their call for a commission to study the Archbishop of Canterbury's role in maintaining communion.

The fact is, if you're going to have a highly centralized communion such as the Anglican church, you've got to have some mechanism to enforce conformity to a standard. Otherwise you effectively lose the communion itself. Now the question is, are highly centralized communions the right approach?