Rowan Williams has issued a lengthy response to decision of the he Episcopal Church in the USA to open its ordination process to all individuals, including gay people.
He’s acknowledged the possibility that the global body will have to adopt a “two-track” model in which there would be “two styles of being Anglican”.
He writes:
It helps to be clear about these possible futures, however much we think them less than ideal, and to speak about them not in apocalyptic terms of schism and excommunication but plainly as what they are – two styles of being Anglican, whose mutual relation will certainly need working out but which would not exclude co-operation in mission and service of the kind now shared in the Communion.
In other words, gays exist, and we’re going to have to learn to rub along together; the 77 million-member body will have to try to work together while holding different theological convictions over such issues as homosexuality.
Big of him. But you’re not going to please the real nasty buggers such as the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, who’s the leading light in a rabidly gay-detesting breakaway group called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans.
I can’t imagine that those bigoted bastards will just learn to rub along, somehow.
