The kind of time-line we're looking at: the covenant design group is hoping for initial responses from around the Communion over the next twelve months, with a view to a revised version of the covenant going to the Lambeth Conference in 2008. It's anticipated that the Lambeth Conference itself will revise the covenant further and that that further revision will then be submitted to the churches of the Communion for final adoption or ratification following the Lambeth Conference in 2008.
The Primates also considered with some care the public release of the report and the draft covenant and the decision they came to was that they believe they have an obligation to share the document with the bishops of the Communion prior to its public release and arrangements are being made for that to happen electronically over the next couple of days, so the hope is that when we provide you with the communiqué on Monday, we will also provide you with the covenant design group's report and the draft covenant. You may wish to pursue that further with me and with Archbishop Drexel in a few minutes.
The third major task we tackled today was to consider the report from the Panel of reference; and we had Archbishop Peter Carnley with us, the former Primate of Australia and Chair of the Panel of Reference; a number of difficulties in the operation of the Panel were pointed out to the Primates and chief among them are these three.
First, the sheer effort that is required to establish the facts in a case when large volumes of written material are produced by all sorts of people involved in a particular matter. Second, sometimes there are constraints around the Panel of reference's work caused by the fact that legal actions are underway which impinge on the Panel's work and the cases it's considering; and third, just the purely human problems of getting timely responses from a large number of people who are distant from each other.
So we had an account of those difficulties that the Panel has experienced; the very blunt question was asked among the Primates about whether the outcomes achieved are proportionate to the work carried out by the Panel; that question was faced squarely and while there's no definitive answer reached yet, it was pointed out by a number of participants in the discussion that there really has to be a will for reconciliation in these circumstances in order for the work of the Panel to be effective. We also considered how the Church should respond if at all to public criticism of reports issued by the Panel; such reports not always being factually correct; those reports can tend to undermine confidence in the Panel. Again those questions require further reflection and the Archbishop of Canterbury will take them up with members of the Panel themselves and with other advisers.
The final thing today we dealt with, which we've just come from, was a session dealing with the listening process, Canon Phil Groves joined the Primates to describe the work he's been doing since his appointment following Dromantine; he's been making contacts around the Communion and compiling reports of what different churches around the Communion are doing in relation to listening to gay and lesbian people and he's also done some theoretical work research on listening processes.
He reported to the Primates that there's an increasing awareness among the churches of the Communion of gay and lesbian people and the issues they face; he emphasised that, for the listening process to be effective, there needs to be established safe ground for homosexual people in order for them to feel safe and to share their experience with the church; and that in some of the listening processes that have been attempted, it has not been always possible to establish such safe ground so that homosexual people feel safe sharing their experiences.
