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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: World Anglican leaders rebuke Canadian church The leaders of the world Anglican Communion rebuked the U.S. and Canadian Anglican churches yesterday over their acceptance of homosexuality and pushed them to withdraw from one of the global church's top policy-making bodies. The severity of the rebuke from the primates, or senior bishops and archbishops of the church, was unexpected. Canadian Anglican academics had thought that most primates would let their desire for church unity trump their objections to homosexuality. And while the move falls well short of branding the Canadian and U.S. churches as heretical and kicking them out of the world Communion, the impact of the primates' announcement on the two churches internally will be explosive. Already festering divisions will be deepened and the anti-homosexual factions will be shored up. Advertisements click here Budget 2004ad1 A communiqué from the primates at their closed gathering in a Roman Catholic retreat house in Northern Ireland also said the church's spiritual leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, would establish a task force to examine “pastoral oversight” — alternate leadership — for Canadian and U.S. Anglicans opposed to their churches' policy on homosexuality. The communiqué did not talk about pastoral oversight mechanisms for gay and lesbian Anglicans in churches where homosexuality is clearly proscribed. Vancouver Anglican theologian Stephen Leggett said last night it is not the business of the Archbishop of Canterbury to meddle in the internal affairs of the autonomous churches of the Anglican Communion. By tradition, the primates do not vote on decisions made at their meetings; they agree on actions by consensus. Thus, Canadian primate Archbishop Andrew Hutchison and U.S. Episcopal (Anglican) Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold agreed to the censure of their own churches. They are scheduled to talk to the news media today. The world Anglican uproar over homosexuality erupted a few years ago after Vancouver's Bishop of New Westminster, Michael Ingham, gave his consent to the blessing of same-sex unions in the churches of his diocese. A year later, the U.S. Episcopal Church (ECUSA) took roughly comparable action and approved the appointment of Gene Robinson, a priest living in a homosexual relationship, as bishop of New Hampshire. Neither action violated the Canadian or U.S. churches' canon law, but they were contrary to a statement issued at the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops from around the world. In fact, New Westminster's action was contrary to a statement by the Canadian House of Bishops. Prof. Leggett, who teaches liturgical studies at Vancouver School of Theology, said the good thing about the primates' communiqué from the Canadian and U.S. points of view is that the primates acknowledged in it that the two churches have their own constitutional mechanisms for dealing with the issue of homosexuality and, for the most part, they agreed on neither encouraging nor initiating outside interference. Archbishop Williams's task force on pastoral oversight will be controversial. Roughly, pastoral oversight means allowing sympathetic outside bishops to look after priests and laity opposed to open acceptance of homosexuality in their dioceses. The Canadian church already has a mechanism for this. In England, so-called flying bishops look after priests who object to being in dioceses where women are ordained. The two churches have been asked to withdraw their representatives from the Anglican Consultative Council, the Communion's executive decision-making body. They've also been asked to make the case for their acceptance of homosexuality at a “hearing” of the council in June. Nothing was said in the communiqué about when the two churches would be invited to return to full participation in the Communion's affairs. “Although it's a relatively mild punitive measure,” Prof. Leggett said, “what the primates are saying is, ‘Your presence bothers us, so don't come.'” The primates discussed ways to make authority in the Anglican Communion more centralized, but the communiqué said they did not make progress on the topic.
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