Anglican Mainstream

Archbishop Rowan Williams has issued this statement:

“This initial response of the House of Bishops is discouraging and indicates the need for further discussion and clarification. Some important questions have still to be addressed and no one is underestimating the challenges ahead.”

The Times reports:

The Anglican Church took another step towards its apparently inevitable schism when US Episcopal bishops rejected the ultimatum from primates of the Anglican Communion to fall into line over homosexuals.

The bishops of the Episcopal Church accused Anglican primates of trying to drag their Church back into “a time of colonialism”. They said late on Tuesday night that they would resist the primates’ demand that they set up a new pastoral scheme with a “primatial vicar” to make a traditionalist enclave for antigay conservatives who reject the oversight of liberal bishops. They said that the scheme “violated” their canons, or Church law.

Christian gays in Britain yesterday welcomed the US decision and accused the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who chaired last month’s primates’ meeting in Tanzania, of trying to “sell them down the river” and of pandering to “forces of the extreme Right”.

If the wealthy US Church, headed by the Communion’s first woman primate, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, is expelled from the Communion, as now appears increasingly likely, the Anglican Communion worldwide will be plunged into financial crisis because so much of the central administration and overseas aid is bank-rolled by the Americans.

Although the 2.3 million American Episcopalians are few among the 77 million Anglicans worldwide, they are understood to finance up to one third of the Communion’s total international budget.

[Read here->http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article1550724.ece]

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