Anglican Rift Widens

When leaders of the worldwide Anglican Church meet next year for their once-a-decade meeting bishops representing almost half of the denomination's 77-million members will be absent.

The steering committee for the Global South Primates, made up of churches mainly in the developing world and the most conservative in the worldwide Anglican Communion, said this week its bishops will boycott the meeting because the American wing of the faith, the Episcopal Church, is allowed to participate.

Conservative Anglicans have been at war with the US Church since the elevation of Gene Robinson in 2003. Robinson is in a committed relationship with another man and is the first and only openly gay bishop in the Anglican Church.

Overseas conservatives have formed two U.S. missions and installed bishops in some breakaway Episcopal parishes to challenge the liberal-leaning Episcopal Church on its home turf. The missions violate an Anglican tradition that church leaders, called primates, only minister to churches within their own territories.

In an effort to quell the growing dissatisfaction by by both sides in the debate, the titular leader of the faith, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, disinvited both Robinson and the illegally installed bishops from the conference. He later relented somewhat, allowing Robinson to attend but only as an observer.

Nevertheless, the Global South bishops say they will not attend the conclave.

In an interview published Monday, Archbishop of York John Sentamu, a close ally of Williams and a leading church conservative in England, said Global South bishops who boycott the meeting will effectively be expelling themselves from the communion.

"Anglicanism has its roots through Canterbury,'' Sentamu told The Daily Telegraph of London. "If you sever that link you are severing yourself from the communion. There is no doubt about it.''