The spiritual
leader of the world's Anglicans raised questions Monday
about the legitimacy of plans to create a global network of
conservative Anglicans that would challenge his
authority and the teachings of liberal North American
churches that are more gay-friendly.
Archbishop of
Canterbury Rowan Williams said proposals to set up a
separate global council of bishops who would train priests
and interpret Scripture would create more problems
than they would solve.
A council ''which
consists of only a self-selected group ... will not
pass the test of legitimacy for all in the Communion,'' he
said.
Conservative
Anglican priests from Africa and some north American and
British churches held a conference in Jerusalem on Sunday to
express their outrage at what they consider a ''false
gospel'' in liberal churches.
Long-standing
divisions over how Anglicans should interpret Scripture
erupted in 2003 when the U.S. Episcopal Church, part of the
Anglican movement, consecrated its first openly gay
bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.
On Monday the
head of the U.S. Episcopal Church, Presiding Bishop
Katharine Jefferts Schori, said that ''much of the Anglican
world must be lamenting the latest emission'' from the
Jerusalem conference.
''Anglicanism has
always been broader than some find comfortable,'' she
said. ''This statement does not represent the end of
Anglicanism, merely another chapter in a centuries-old
struggle for dominance by those who consider
themselves the only true believers.''
The Anglican
Communion is a 77 million-member family of churches that
trace their roots to the Church of England. It is the
third-largest grouping of churches in the world,
behind Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians, and
has always held together different views.
As part of their
new fellowship, the conservatives said they would
continue to take oversight of breakaway churches in the
United States and elsewhere who reject their liberal
leaders.
Williams warned
that their plans to intervene when congregations or
priests around the world complain about the teachings of
their local bishops would lead to the church being
used to settle personal scores.
''How is a bishop
or primate in another continent able to discriminate
effectively between a genuine crisis of pastoral
relationship and theological integrity, and a
situation where are underlying nontheological
motivations at work?'' he said.
In their official
statement from the conference, the conservative groups
said they ''do not accept that Anglican identity is
determined necessarily through recognition by the
archbishop of Canterbury.''
They also called
the current setup for the communion, with the archbishop
of Canterbury at its center, ''a colonial structure.''
Some of the key
conservative bishops plan to attend a smaller conference
Tuesday on global Anglicanism and English orthodoxy at the
conservative All Souls Church in central
London. (Meera Selva, AP)
