A meeting of Anglican Church leaders in Dublin has been boycotted by many of those invited in protest at the US Episcopal Church's ordination of homosexuals as bishops and the blessing of homosexual couples.
The six-day Primates' Meeting, starting in Dublin on 25 January 2011, has been boycotted by as many as ten of the leaders of the Anglican Communion’s 38 provinces – a fifth of the world's Anglican leaders – because of Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who represents the Episcopal Church and is a supporter of homosexual clergy and homosexual “marriage”.
Katharine Jeffers Schori, who is the first woman to be elected as a primate in the Anglican Communion, has recently defied other Anglican churches by ordaining a lesbian bishop and authorising services for the blessing of homosexual relationships.
The Archbishops who are boycotting the meeting said that they have become disillusioned by what they see as the Church’s failure to act on views based on traditional principles. Some of them want sanctions to be imposed against the American branch of the Communion and have called for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, to be replaced as the figure around which the Communion unites.
Canon Chris Sugden, of the group ‘Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans’, wrote in Evangelicals Now magazine that the leaders' absence "calls into question the ability of the Archbishop of Canterbury (Rowan Williams) to fulfil his role as gatherer of the Communion."
In September 2010 Dr Rowan Williams expressed his personal support for the consecration of homosexual bishops in the Church of England as long as they stay celibate. He said at the time that he had been conscious of the issue of homosexuality as “a wound in the whole ministry” since his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002.
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