Article Added On: February 21, 2005 - over 5 years ago
Title: Anglicans grapple with rift over homosexuality
Author: Michael Valpy
Publication: The Globe and Mail
Publication Date: January 01, 2005 - over 5 years ago
Faith Groups: Anglicans
Themes: same sex marriage/blessing

Abstract: Senior clerics meet this week to address dispute over same-sex unions, gay priests

Monday, February 21, 2005

The senior archbishops of the 78-million-member global Anglican Communion today begin what its spiritual leader has called their week of agony, a meeting in Belfast to address Anglicanism's accelerating slide toward schism over homosexuality.

As wealthy conservative U.S. Anglicans intensely lobbied the communion's 38 national primates last night and handed out cellphones to sympathetic prelates so they could report on what happens at the closed-door gathering, there was little expectation the archbishops would lessen disharmony, let alone resolve the conflict.

The most likely predicted outcome is that they will issue a statement saying they are praying for unity and then pass the problem on to another body within the church.

Anglicanism's spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, said last week the issue has "weakened if not destroyed the sense that we are actually talking the same language within the Anglican Communion."

He used the word "agony" to describe dissension over the blessing of homosexual unions and the ordination of practising homosexual priests, and predicted it would have "no cost-free outcome."

The dispute is largely between churches in the global south and the liberal national churches of the United States and Canada, although both North American churches have significant dissident conservative rumps.

The primates' gathering has been billed in the news media and some corners of the church as an ecclesiastical shootout at the OK Corral. But, as church scholars point out, in Anglicanism's curious structure, the primates of the communion's 38 affiliated churches have no authority to solve problems and may not even speak for the churches they represent.

Unlike Roman Catholicism, with the Pope as its supreme ruler, in the Anglican Communion the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is also Primate of All England, and the other national primates are merely first among equals.

Moreover, not only are Anglicanism's national churches, or provinces, autonomous, but individual dioceses and their bishops within national churches have considerable autonomy.

Thus the Canadian primate, Archbishop Andrew Hutchison, has no authority to order the bishop of Vancouver's Diocese of New Westminster, Michael Ingham, to forbid the blessing of same-sex unions, even though the rite is contrary to declarations by both the general synod, or governing body, of the Canadian church and the decennial Lambeth Conference of the global church's bishops.

Eric Beresford, president of Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax who has been a consultant to both the Canadian church and the Anglican Communion, said there are persistent reports that primates from Africa, Asia and Latin America will press for more centralized decision-making, bringing Anglicanism closer to Roman Catholicism in a framework of theological and liturgical conformity.

But he suggested the southern primates may be taking this tack only because the issue is sex. On any other subject, he said, they would likely be profoundly unsympathetic to increased centralization.

Rev. Beresford said that all but a tiny minority of the Communion's primates, despite their deep disagreements on homosexuality, want to avoid an open fracture.

He said there is understanding, for example, that the Nigerian church, the second-largest Anglican church after England, is in a country divided between Christianity (mainly Anglicanism) and Islam, which resolutely rejects homosexuality.

"The primate of Nigeria [Archbishop Peter Akinola] will have enormous concern with how the liberalism of the West plays out and how it makes the church look in Nigeria."

It could even put Nigerian Anglicans physically at risk, Rev. Beresford said.

Original article