From Reuters-
Archbishop Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the world's 80 million Anglicans, suggested last week that member churches approving gay bishops and same-sex unions and those actively opposing them be sidelined from official doctrinal committees.
The initiative was sparked by the consecration of an openly lesbian bishop in California last month. Williams also said conservative churches -- mostly in Africa -- that appoint bishops to serve in other countries would also be sidelined.
The proposal, if accepted in the Communion, would be the first time such sanctions would be imposed on dissident national churches. Unlike Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism is a federation of churches whose head has no direct power over all members.
A group campaigning for homosexual rights in the Communion said the threatened discipline caused it little worry because the committees the dissenters could not work on were "trivial."
"These are delaying tactics, sops to the conservatives, which in reality gives them nothing," Colin Coward, director of Changing Attitude, UK, told Reuters.
The Episcopal bishop of California accused Williams of "creating a different kind of Anglicanism, more like the centralized, doctrinalised polity of the Roman Catholic Church."
"When an empire and its exponents can no longer exercise control by might, an option is to feint, double-talk and manipulate," Bishop Marc Andrus wrote on his blog.
CONSERVATIVES NOT IMPRESSED
Equally dismissive comments came from Bishop David Anderson, who heads the conservative American Anglican Council launched to oppose liberal trends in the Episcopal Church, the official U.S. member church in the Anglican Communion.
More here-
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6512PI20100602
No comments:
Post a Comment