Anglican Church split over women bishops

LONDON: The worldwide Anglican Communion of nearly 80 million Christians has split in all but name over the ordaining of women as bishops. Theologians and senior clergymen said a 1,300-strong band of dissident priests have threatened to leave the church if women are ordained as bishops.
The dissident clergymen, mainly from Africa and Asia, have provoked the spiritual head of the Anglican church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to hit back at an apparently post-colonial ���reversal of power��� attempt.
Archbishop Rowan Williams, however, said, ���No one is likely to look back with complacency at the colonial legacy, but emerging from the legacy of colonialism must mean a new cooperation of equals, not a simple reversal of power.���
In India, the CIPBC is seen as the original Anglican Church, continuing an Anglican presence dating to 1600. Additionally, the Mar Thoma church is one of those characterised as in ���full communion��� with the See of Canterbury or the spiritual heart of Anglicanism, but which are not culturally or denominationally Anglican.
The Archbishop's comments came on the eve of a London meeting which was to be addressed by three of the key dissident clergymen. The tussle over leadership is seen as the clearest sign yet of the Anglican church struggling to keep the lines of authority here, even as it fights off a move by the so-called ���evangelical militia��� to seize control and run it out of Africa.
A split in the Anglican Communion has long been feared, ever since the consecration in the US of an openly gay priest, Gene Robinson, in 2003.
Over the weekend, the conservative developing-world Anglican clergy formed a new international group in Jerusalem, the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (Foca). It was born with 1,148 lay and clergy participants, including 291 bishops, many of them from the developing world where Christian congregations are growing fastest.
The group downplays the primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury and boldly says that it ���rejects the authority of those churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith in word or deed.���
Anglican clergymen in the UK admitted on Tuesday that their church appeared to have split in all but name with at least one senior Welsh minister declaring that the formation of a new group means a schism had definitely taken place.
At least 300 bishops, principally from Africa, but also from the US, UK and Asia, said they wanted to ���sideline��� Williams' leadership of the worldwide Communion. Foca published 14 central tenets of faith based on traditionalist interpretations of scripture and committed itself solely to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
In a bitter attack on the traditionalist rebels, the aides said the dissidents were in danger of ���becoming a Protestant sect���.