WASHINGTON (AFP) — Anglican Christians in the United States have moved to break away from the Episcopal Church, bringing a long-feared schism to the Anglican Communion after years of internal feuding over gay clergy and women priests.
The Common Cause Partnership, which groups some 700 conservative Anglican congregations, on Wednesday released a provisional constitution and canons for a new branch of the Anglican Church in North America.
Although the 100,000-strong breakaway movement represents a small fraction of the global Anglican Communion, which is estimated at 77 million adherents, including 2.2 million in the United States, it hopes it will be recognized as a province, or key jurisdiction, of the Anglican Communion.
But on Thursday, a spokesperson for Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the head of the Church of England which is the mother church of the Anglican Communion, said the rebel clergy had not even begun to create a new church.
"There are clear guidelines set out in the Anglican Consultative Council Reports... detailing the steps necessary for the amendments of existing provincial constitutions and the creation of new provinces," the spokesperson said.
"Once begun, any of these processes will take years to complete. In relation to the recent announcement from the meeting of the Common Cause Partnership in Chicago, the process has not yet begun."
The breakaway church includes eight North American Anglican groups and bishops and congregations linked to conservative churches in Kenya, Uganda, and South America.
The preamble to the new church's constitution says its leaders are "grieved by the current state of brokenness within the Anglican Communion prompted by those who have embraced erroneous teaching and who have rejected a repeated call to repentance."
"The Anglican Communion itself in its official documents talks about how the fabric of the Communion has been torn by the actions of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada," Robert Lundy, a spokesman for the breakaway branch of the church told AFP.
The Episcopal Church in 2003 sparked controversy when it ordained the openly gay Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire.
It also irked conservatives in 1989 when it consecrated Barbara Harris as its first female bishop.
But Lundy denied that homosexuality and the ordination of women were the reasons for the break.
"The homosexuality issue, issues of women's ordination are just symptoms of the real problem," he said.
"This is a split over deeply held theological convictions and matters essential to the faith. Homosexuality is not essential to the faith. Jesus is and the Bible is, and that's why this is happening," he said.
Several Anglican dioceses and groups in the United States had already broken with the Episcopal Church this year after some 291 bishops representing millions of conservative Anglicans called at a meeting in Jerusalem for a breakaway province in North America.
The new church in its constitutional preamble thanked the bishops for calling on them "to establish a new Province in North America."
Michael Howell, head of Forward in Faith North America, which is part of the new church, said it would allow orthodox Anglicans to focus on "the things that unite us instead of things that divide us."
"Some of us have been praying for this for decades," he said on the Common Cause Partnership's website.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
