A divisive row over homosexuality and women bishops has left the worldwide Anglican Communion facing one of its worst ever crises, to the point where there is talk of an irrevocable schism."The crisis is unprecedented since the Reformation devastated the Roman Catholic Church in England in the 16th century," The Times said Tuesday in a front-page article on a threat by 1,300 clergy to quit over women bishops.
And on Sunday after a conference in Jerusalem, some 300 conservative bishops and archbishops announced the creation of a new grouping that does not recognise the authority of Anglican leader the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The conservatives, who criticise liberal attitudes towards homosexuality and the "spiritual decline" in the West, proposed a council of primates, formed of five African and one South American clergy to become its highest authority.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who is the Church of England's highest-ranking cleric, on Monday described the proposals from the Jerusalem meeting, the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), as "problematic".
"I urge those who have outlined these to think very carefully about the risks entailed," he said in a statement. "It is not enough to dismiss the existing structures of the Communion.
"If they are not working effectively, the challenge is to renew them rather than to improvise solutions that may seem to be effective for some in the short term but will continue to create more problems than they solve."
Williams invited the dissidents to the Lambeth Conference of Bishops, Anglicanism's once-a-decade meeting of high-ranking clergy from around the world, to discuss the situation.
The conference is to be held in Canterbury, southeast England, from July 16 to August 4, but most of those who attended GAFCON have said they will not attend.
Splits in the Anglican Communion are not new.
It has been deeply divided since the ordination by one of its members, the US Episcopal Church, of Gene Robinson, an openly gay American priest, as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.
There was also opposition to the ordination of Barbara Harris as the US church's first female bishop in 1989.
For the conservatives, such practices cast doubt on the interpretation of Christianity's sacred text the Bible and the fundamental tenets of faith for Anglicanism's 77 million followers worldwide.
In a comment piece for the website of The Guardian newspaper on Monday, religion writer Andrew Brown said a schism already existed, "but you couldn't measure it later than yesterday, when a gathering of 200 mostly African bishops signed up in Jerusalem to a new church," referring to the breakaway group to be known as the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, or Foca.
According to Jonathan Bartley, co-director of research for the religious think tank Ekklesia, the Anglican Church has much less of a top-down structure than the Catholic Church, which now has more practising followers in Britain.
That has allowed different strands of thought to develop, putting Williams in a bind between two sides, neither of which is happy.
"It's a seismic change that is happening. It's about more than different interpretations of the Bible, more than the issue of homosexuality and women bishops," he said.
"It's the way the Church organises itself and its structures of control and structures of relationship between the Church and those who make up the Communion."
Part of the problem was the move from a more rigid hierarchy, dating from when England's king Henry VIII split from the Catholic Church in 1534 over its refusal to grant him a divorce from his first wife, to new ideas and diversity.
"In the Anglican Church there has been more room for diversity than in the Catholic Church," Bartley said.
"The archbishop (of Canterbury) is not like the pope, but nevertheless the structure has to change in order to accommodate these changes."
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