People think the Anglican church is obsessed with sex in a battle over homosexuality that ”very few really want to be fighting”, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said on Monday.
The Anglican communion, a loose federation of 38 national churches, has been split between a liberal minority and a conservative majority, especially since the naming of an openly gay United States bishop in 2003.
After a tense meeting of church leaders in the Tanzanian city of Dar Es Salaam this month, the Anglican Communion gave the US Episcopal Church a September deadline to stop blessing same sex unions.
Speaking to the Church of England synod, the spiritual leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans said: ”It feels as though we are caught in a battle very few really want to be fighting, like soldiers in the trenches somewhere around 1916.”
Williams, who has no power to enforce solutions in a church run by consensus, has said the US Episcopal Church might not be invited to the 2008 Lambeth Conference — a once in a decade meeting of all Anglican bishops — if it did not comply.
The archbishop, who admits he may be unable to prevent schism in the 450-year-old church, said the public perception was that ”we are a Church obsessed with sex”.
”This is what many within the Church feel as well and I’d be surprised if many in this chamber did not echo that,” he told the Church of England ”parliament” at a London meeting taking stock of the bitterly divisive issue.
”It is natural to want to say this is a war no one chose, there must be a simple way of halting the conflict,” he told fellow clerics in the church founded when King Henry VIII broke with Rome to divorce his first wife.
Williams, a once liberal theologian moving steadily towards conservative views, was clearly exasperated by the way the row has escalated as traditionalists in Africa, Asia and Latin America challenge the declining churches in the affluent West.
”Whatever happened, we might ask, to persuasion? To the frustrating business of conducting recognisable arguments in a shared language?” he asked.
Williams said he would be returning to Africa next week for talks in Southern Africa on how the Anglican church could contribute to millennium development goals.
He pleaded once more for ill will to be buried and a schism prevented so church leaders could concentrate on development resources.
”This work will be harder and more poorly resourced if the structures of the Communion are loosened, destroyed or so localised that they cannot work flexibly on the global scene,” he concluded. ‒ Reuters