An astute observer of the travails of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) offered this assessment:

“The gravest error now afflicting the ACNA is not misconduct, nor even scandal, but a fundamental category mistake: the confusion of institutional defensibility with ecclesial fitness. Whether allegations are true or false is, at this stage, almost irrelevant. The Church does not require bishops who are merely defensible; it requires bishops whose very visibility does not fracture trust.

“To install an interim archbishop whose past must be explained, contextualized, hedged, or juridically caveated—precisely amid cascading failures of credibility—is not prudence. It is a confession. It reveals a Church that has already surrendered its understanding of authority, mistaking procedural survival for moral coherence.

“This is not about guilt or innocence. It is about contradiction. Episcopal authority is not a credential one holds behind the scenes; it is a public reality that either gathers trust or corrodes it. When leadership itself becomes a point of dispute, the office is already impaired. No amount of clearance can repair what visibility itself destroys.

“The College of Bishops has acted as though the Church could be stabilized by internal process, governed by managerial logic, and healed by compliance. But the Church is not a corporation weathering reputational risk. It is a moral body whose authority depends upon the credibility of those who stand before it. When leaders require explanation simply to be tolerated, authority has already collapsed into administration.

“What we are witnessing, then, is not merely a leadership failure but a theological one: a refusal to reckon with what a bishop is. By privileging technical legitimacy over moral intelligibility, the ACNA has chosen institutional continuity over ecclesial truth.

“And institutions may survive such choices for a time. Bodies do not.”

I believe this assessment is accurate. Furthermore, rejiggering the canons will change nothing. This is little more than window dressing, rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Read it all at Virtue Oniine