Article Added On: February 24, 2005 - over 3 years ago
Title: Anglican churches battle over conflicting beliefs
Author: Michael Valpy
Publication: The Globe and Mail
Publication Date: January 01, 2005 - over 3 years ago
Faith Groups: Anglicans
Themes: same sex marriage/blessing

Abstract: The 78-million-member Anglican Communion, the world's third largest Christian body after the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, has been tumbled rudely out of its laissez-faire theology, reports Michael Valpy of the Globe and Mail.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

The hoary joke about Anglicans is that they are Christians who can believe in anything as long as they don't believe in it too strongly. Ha-ha.

Except it's a joke that's tripped over its punchline -- with Anglican clerics and laity around the planet now publicly and noisily pummelling each other on homosexuality, the role of women, biblical interpretation, the Charles-Camilla marriage and episcopal flock-poaching.

The 78-million-member Anglican Communion, the world's third largest Christian body after the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, has been tumbled rudely out of its laissez-faire theology.

Today it looks bent on dismembering itself, a sect no longer able to tolerate the cultural differences that have shaped conflicting beliefs and values in its 38 affiliated ecclesiastical territories in 64 countries.

The communion's senior archbishops and bishops yesterday brushed world poverty and the HIV-AIDS pandemic off the agenda of their meeting in Northern Ireland so they could continue feuding over same-sex marriage and the ordination of practising homosexuals as priests.

The governing body of the Church of England, the mother-church of the communion, just finished debating whether to establish a separate ecclesiastical body with an all-male priestly hierarchy for those opposed to the appointment of women priests as bishops.

Conservative Anglican clergy have vowed to disrupt next month's civil wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles because they believe neither the Prince nor his long-time lover would meet the Church of England's test for the remarriage of divorced persons.

National Anglican churches in the United States and Canada are fracturing, in Canada with more noise than substance, over the blessing of same-sex unions, with priests opposed to the blessing rejecting their diocesan bishops' authority and inviting conservative bishops from other countries to oversee them.

Five senior archbishops from Asia and Africa, where recognition of homosexuality is anathema, have made several visits to North America to gather priests under their wing; an insult almost beyond words in Anglicanism, where "Thou shalt not interfere in another bishop's jurisdiction" is treated like a commandment.

But it's happening with increasing frequency, and with weird results.

The archbishop of Melbourne recently banished from church duties a bishop of the Australian Anglican Church who went to the United States to consecrate an Anglican priest as a bishop in a schismatic Anglican sect. Meanwhile, an existing Australian bishop in the schismatic sect re-ordained an American Episcopalian (Anglican) priest defrocked by his bishop for disobedience.

Richard Leggatt, professor of liturgical studies at Vancouver School of Theology and an Anglican priest, said the church is reaping today the seeds sown more than 300 years by Anglican missionaries from Europe and North America who went out to the rest of the world, and to aboriginal communities in the North, and ruthlessly crushed the indigenous cultures.

Now as the liberal churches in the United States and Canada want full acceptance of homosexuality, Anglicans in the global South and the aboriginal North are saying, "Hold on for a moment, that's not what you taught us," Dr. Leggatt said. He said the Anglican Communion in addition is confronting the rise of Islam, "and it's not the tolerant Islam of the Middle Ages," in head-to-head competition in many Southern countries along with the resurgence in the United States of conservative social values, creating Anglicans with money who are building alliances with conservative African and Asian churches they see eye to eye with.

As for the mother Church of England, he said, Anglicanism's neo-puritan wing with its defined set of values is being more successful than the Anglicanism-of-all-things.

The heart of Anglicanism is its roots in a particular culture, he said, and if its leaders give in to pressure for a more centralized authority, the church will be lost.

Original article