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How Nolbert Kunonga came to be elected
From the Revd Dr D. B. McConkey SSC Sir, — Those who knew his ministry in the diocese of Harare might dispute aspects of your sympathetic portrait of the Revd Timothy Neill (Features, 23 May). Certain details in his muddled account of the election of Dr Nolbert Kunonga as Bishop of Harare, however, need to be challenged. Bishops in the Church of the Province of Central Africa are chosen by an electoral college, of which Mr Neill was indeed a member, elected to that post by the synod of the diocese of Harare. The job of the vicar-general of a vacant diocese to “put the list of approved candidates to the electorate”, though, is a purely imaginary one. The electoral process is determinedly a provincial, not purely diocesan, one. No one apart from the Archbishop is a member of the electoral college by virtue of any other office. The electoral college’s deliberations are privileged, and the facts known or alleged of any candidate are confidential. What is a matter of public record, though, is that the electoral college, duly constituted, elected Dr Kunonga. After the election, there is a prescribed canonical procedure for the confirmation of the election, a procedure not dissimilar to the confirmation of a diocesan bishop of the Church of England in the Court of Arches. The confirmation was indeed presided over by the then Archishop of the Province. Mr Neill used the press to allege irregularities in the confirmation. These contentions were debatable, but the Archbishop, in the interest of quieting any doubt, convened a second court of confirmation. I served as a member of that second court, which was presided over by the Rt Revd Sebastian Bakare, then Bishop of Manicaland, in his capacity as Dean of the Province. The grounds for which the court can refuse to confirm an episcopal election are narrowly drawn. The court was certainly not free to entertain objections founded in hearsay and innuendo. When all the evidence had been presented, the court proceeded, as we believed ourselves legally bound, unanimously to confirm the election of Dr Kunonga. It is simply not the case that Dr Kunonga “was elected contrary to the canons”. Mr Neill offers the curious obiter dictum that Dr Kunonga “had been ruled out because of his lack of theology”. It might be queried whether Mr Neill’s own ragbag of bits of deliverance theology, the Toronto Blessing, and virulent anti-Catholicism constituted a more coherent theological framework. When the list of “people in leadership” in the diocese of Harare whose failures brought about the debâcle of the Kunonga episcopate is compiled, though, surely a place must be found on it for Mr Neill himself. D. B. McCONKEY18 Park Lane Swindon SN1 5EL |
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