It Is Too Late To Stop Anglican Split, Bishop Says
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COLUMBUS, Ohio – Efforts to prevent a schism in worldwide Anglicanism are now futile because it has become “two religions,” a senior Church of England bishop said yesterday.
In an outspoken interview with the Daily Telegraph, the Bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali, said that divisions between liberals and conservatives were so profound that a compromise was no longer possible.
He increased the pressure on the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, to take firm action against the liberal leadership of the Episcopal Church, the American branch of Anglicanism.
“Anglicans are used to fudging things sometimes, but I think this is a matter of such seriousness that fudge won’t do,” said Bishop Nazir-Ali. “Sometimes you have to recognize that there are two irreconcilable positions and you have to choose between them.
“The right choice is in line with the Bible and the Church’s teaching down the ages, not some new-fangled religion we have invented to respond to the 21st century.
“My fear is that the Church of England has made a number of moves in the liberal, Protestant direction. That gives me concerns that the Bible will become less important and that the Church is moving away from its traditional Catholic order.
“If you move in that direction you become a kind of options Church, where you live by preferences.”
Bishop Nazir-Ali’s comments, made at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention, in Columbus, Ohio, where he was an official guest, are the most frank by a Church of England bishop.
They will come as a blow to Dr. Williams, who has expended much energy holding the warring factions together, because the Pakistan-born evangelical bishop has the ear of powerful conservative Anglican leaders in Africa and Asia. But they will be welcomed by those who fear that Dr. Williams will do everything he can to avoid expelling the liberal Americans from the worldwide Anglican Communion. Bishop Nazir-Ali suggested that the Episcopal Church was already beyond the pale, irrespective of how it voted on a series of crucial resolutions designed to test whether it was prepared to back away from its liberal agenda.
He said an unconnected decision by its House of Bishops on Friday to back civil if not religious marriages for gay couples was so significant it made issues such as gay bishops “an interesting footnote.”