Anglican Communion Threatens Split Over Gay Priests
The worldwide Anglican Communion is threatening to expel its U.S. branch, the American Episcopal Church, over the issue of gay priests.
At the end of a five-day crisis meeting this week near Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, the Communion issued a strongly-worded communiqué that gave the American church seven months to pledge not to consecrate another gay bishop or approve an official prayer service for blessing same-sex couples, or else face expulsion.
The homosexual controversy within the Anglican community has raged since 2003, when the U.S. denomination consecrated its first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. Several liberal American bishops have already said they would prefer expulsion to reversing their pro-gay policies, the Daily Telegraph in Britain reports.
"If the primates are asking us to undo what we have already done, that is a step many of the bishops would be unwilling to take,” said the bishop of Connecticut, the Right Reverend Andrew Smith.
Archbishop Peter Akinola, head of the 17.5 million-member Anglican Church of Nigeria, is leading the campaign against consecrating gays, according to the Christian Post.
Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi of Uganda refused Holy Communion while attending the meeting in Tanzania.
"I have not received Holy Communion at any primates’ meeting since the U.S. Episcopal Church consecrated a divorced bishop living in a same-sex relationship,” he said at a press conference.
"I, along with several of my colleagues, were unable to come to the Holy Table with the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. To do so would have been a violation of the teaching and traditional Anglican understanding of Holy Communion.”
He declared that according to the Bible, sexual intimacy is reserved for a husband and wife "in lifelong, heterosexual, monogamous marriages.”
After the meeting in Tanzania, which was aimed at reconciling conservative and liberal views on homosexuality, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams spoke of the "painful intensity” of the talks, and said there was a need for a worldwide Christian church that "could balance unity and consent.”
The American Episcopal Church has 2.3 million members, but provides a large portion of the Anglican Communion’s budget.
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