MICHAEL VALPY
Globe and Mail Update
June 24, 2007 at 6:23 PM EDT
A razor-thin majority of Canada's Anglican bishops on Sunday overrode the wishes of their laity and clergy and vetoed a resolution that would have allowed for blessings in church settings of committed homosexual unions.
The bishops' action -- taken at the Canadian church's triennial general synod, or governing parliament, held in Winnipeg -- will spare it from censure by leaders of other branches of the global Anglican Communion, almost all of whom are vehemently opposed to blessing same-sex unions and permitting priests to be in open homosexual relationships.
But it will anger many adherents of the church domestically, particularly in Canada's large urban centres, and isolate the U.S. wing of Anglicanism, the Episcopal Church, which alone in the Anglican Communion has approved a liturgy for same-sex blessings and appointed an openly gay bishop.
The resolution would have permitted individual dioceses -- administrative units of the church overseen by a bishop -- to permit same-sex blessings in individual parish churches with the concurrence of the local bishop and “in a manner which respects the conscience of the incumbent [parish priest] and the will of the parish.”
It needed a triple majority of bishops, clergy and laity to pass. The laity voted 79 to 59 in favour and clergy voted 63 to 53, but bishops voted 21 to 19 against.
Bishops who voted against the resolution told synod delegates that a yes-vote would have violated the oath Anglican priests take on ordination to remain in communion with “the Church of England throughout the world.” The 77-million member Anglican Communion, Christianity's third largest denomination, traces its roots to the Church of England.
One bishop said that such a “de facto impairment of the communion” would have been a costly choice for the Anglican Church of Canada, which, although it has 800,000 members on its parish rolls, has only about 130,000 adherents who regularly attend worship services.
One downtown Toronto parish, Holy Trinity, passed a resolution prior to the week-long general synod stating it would approve the blessing of same-sex unions regardless of what synod decided.
The retired archbishop of Toronto, Terry Finlay, had his licence to perform marriages lifted by his successor earlier this year after he took part in the marriage of a lesbian couple. He and five other retired archbishops circulated an open letter to synod delegates urging them to approve the resolution; he also wrote a comment-page essay for The Globe and Mail.
Michael Ingham, bishop of the greater Vancouver diocese of New Westminster, ignited a furor in the Anglican church both in Canada and elsewhere around the world when he authorized the blessing of same-sex unions in 2003 after his diocesan synod had voted in favour of the blessing in three successive years.
No other bishop has followed his lead. Indeed, when the synod of the Ontario diocese of Niagara voted this year in favour of blessing same-sex unions, it's bishop, Ralph Spence, refused permission for it to happen.
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