One of the questions that casts a long shadow over Anglican and Episcopalian decision-making about issues such as the ordination of women and the blessing of same-sex unions is how movement on these issues will affect Anglican churches’ relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. That relationship has been, to say the least, strained since, oh, 1529, but the Anglican Church and the Roman Church have much in common, and the two churches have engaged in fruitful ecumenical conversations, most especially through the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. Robinson’s consecration was a “speed bump” for this dialogue.

Rome has been commenting on Anglican doings a lot this month. According to British news reports, Pope Benedict, to his everlasting credit, said that he did not want C of E priests who were upset about the female bishops vote in York to just leap into the Tiber.
Today, Cardinal Ivan Dias of Bombay, Catholic delegate to Lambeth, has chastised the progressive wing of the Anglican church. It struck me as interesting that, according to the Guardian, Cardinal Dias cast his critique at least partly in the language of “relevance”:

Dias told bishops the battle to bring Christ to the world must be placed in the “wider context of spiritual combat” with Satan. “If this context is ignored in favour of a myopic world-vision, Christ’s salvation will be conveniently dismissed as irrelevant.

Relevance, of course, is invoked by people on both sides of the sexuality debates, and it has been invoked in ecclesial debates for a long time: in the 1970s, when the Episcopal Church was in the process of revising the prayerbook, proponents of revision worried that the old prayer book was no longer relevant; in 1928, the previous prayer book revision, prayers for the sick and dying, for the social order, and for doctors and nurses were added to the prayer book, in an effort to make the prayers more relevant to a nation that had just experienced World War. The list goes on… It’s curious: I’m not sure that “relevance” is a Christian virtue.
By the way, for an interesting piece on the Windsor Report’s implications for Catholic-Anglican dialogue, see this article from the Anglican Theological Review by Kevin Flynn.