Leaders of the 77 million-member Anglican Communion gather in Tanzania today for what is almost universally predicted to be the schismatic death-rattle -- or "a bit of pruning," as one English bishop acidly put it -- of the world's third largest Christian denomination.Anglicanism's titular leader, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has proposed a two-tier church that would label the liberal Canadian and U.S. branches as second-class "associates," with New Zealanders and South Africans possibly thrown in.
The remaining national churches, or provinces, would bear the status of full "constituent" members.
The line in the sand is over how each of the communion's 38 autonomous provinces deal with homosexuality.
You're in if you forbid the blessing of same-sex unions and the presence of actively gay priests and bishops. Otherwise, you're out.
Anglican leaders in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America -- calling themselves the Global South -- head up the largest and fastest growing segments of the church. With few exceptions they believe homosexuality is wrong, a position in line with Roman Catholic teaching that calls it "disordered."
Perhaps not coincidentally, the leading Catholic news service Zenit just published an interview with three Catholic theologians who have written a book declaring the Bible to be unequivocally clear in its denunciation of homosexuality.
Primates from the southern hemisphere have been pushing the North American Anglican churches toward the exit door since the Episcopal Church, as Anglicanism is called in the United States, elected an openly gay bishop in 2003, while the bishop of New Westminster, B.C., approved the blessing of same-sex unions.
The Anglican Church of Canada will decide nationally on blessing same-sex unions at its general assembly, or synod, in June. A majority of its priests and bishops will likely approve.
The five-day Tanzanian meeting is formally an assembly of the communion's primates, or senior archbishops of each province.
But Archbishop Williams also invited two conservative bishops of the Episcopal Church to attend -- a move that elicited a scorching letter from the Canadian primate, Archbishop Andrew Hutchinson -- thus implying there are not one but two branches of Anglicanism in the United States, although only seven of the 100-plus Episcopal dioceses have indicated they want to pull away from the main church.
The Global South has been pushing for a "two-church solution" in the United States that would become a model for every Anglican province such as Canada that has a liberal majority and a conservative minority.
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