Church failing on poverty amid homosexuality debate, says Tutu

|PIC1|Archbishop Desmond Tutu has expressed anger at the Anglican church for putting the row over homosexuality before the need to tackle world poverty.

Speaking at a Tearfund conference of church leaders in London this weekend, Archbishop Tutu said that the church's central position in communities in the UK and overseas meant it was well placed to respond to global poverty, reports the BBC.

He added, however, that he felt ashamed of Anglicans for continuing their "obsession" with homosexuality whilst 30,000 people die each day because of poverty.

"We really will not be able to win wars against so-called terror as long as there are conditions that make people desperate, and poverty, disease and ignorance are amongst the chief culprits," he told church leaders, according to the BBC.

"We seem to be engaging in this kind of, almost, past-time [while] there's poverty, hunger, disease, corruption. I must imagine that God is weeping, and the world quite rightly should dismiss the Church in those cases as being totally irrelevant."

Archbishop Tutu denied the claim of traditionalists that homosexuality is a choice and suggested that the best way to deal with the crisis in the Anglican Communion was to shelve the debate.

"It will be good for us obviously, to resolve our differences on this, and maybe accept that we agree to differ," he said.

He also accused traditionalists of treating homosexual people in an un-Christlike manner by "persecuting the already persecuted".

At the recent Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams said that the Anglican Communion's official position on homosexuality had not changed since the 1998 resolution Lambeth 1.10 rejected homosexuality as incompatible with Scripture.

Bishops at the conference agreed an immediate halt to the consecration of homosexual clergy as bishops, the blessing of same-sex unions and cross-border interventions, although The Episcopal Church in the USA, the church at the heart of the row, indicated that it would allow local churches to make the final decision regarding implementation.

The Conference saw more than 600 bishops march through central London in a call to the Government to do more to ensure the fulfilment of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. The march was in collaboration with Micah Challenge, a worldwide movement of Christians who are lobbying their governments to reach the MDGs, set by world leaders in 2000 with the aim of halving extreme global poverty.