Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion, said on Wednesday he had ”great confidence” that rifts caused by his appointment could be healed.
”I feel enfolded in love,” the new Episcopal bishop of the north-eastern American state of New Hampshire said on BBC radio, a day after his confirmation following three days of heated debate.
”I would agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury (Rowan Williams, the spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican church) that there will be difficult days ahead, that is no surprise to anyone,” he said.
”But I must say that I have great confidence in the Archbishop of Canterbury and all of our bishops and all of our churches that somehow we can heal whatever rifts show themselves in the coming days, months and years.”
”I just set out to follow God’s call to me and then the people of the diocese called me to be their bishop,” he said.
A majority of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops, meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, voted on Tuesday to ratify Robinson’s appointment as bishop of New Hampshire despite his 13-year relationship with another man.
Conservatives within church ranks, many of whom have fiercely opposed Robinson’s election on the grounds it violates Biblical teachings, were quick to express their disapproval.
”This body has divided itself from millions of Anglican Christians around the world,” said Robert Duncan, bishop of Pittsburgh. ”With grief too deep for words, the bishops who stand before you must reject this action.”
Robinson’s confirmation was stalled by a day by accusations from a Vermont man, contained in what was supposed to have been a private e-mail, that he once had been ”inappropriately” been touched by the clergyman.
Robinson, speaking on BBC radio’s Today programme, said Wednesday that he ”hardly knew how to respond” to the accusation.
”In that 24-hour period, seeing my name on TV and hearing my name in the same sentence as sexual misconduct and pornography was not an easy thing to stand by and watch and not be affected by.”
He said there was no evidence of a ”nefarious” campaign to halt his election, but added that the 11th-hour emergence of the Vermonter’s harassment claims was ”odd and a bit curious”.
In a statement on Tuesday, Williams said: ”It is my hope that the church in America and the rest of the Anglican Communion will have the opportunity to consider this development before significant and irrevocable decisions are made in response.”
”I have said before that we need as a church to be very careful about making decisions for our own part of the world which constrain the church elsewhere,” added the Archbishop of Canterbury. – Sapa-AFP