Nigerian archbishop blasts Episcopal Church stand

CHICAGO - A leading conservative critic of the U.S. Episcopal Church said on Wednesday its bishops have turned their back on pleas from global Anglican church leaders to take a clear stand against consecrating gays as bishops or blessing same-sex unions.

"Sadly it seems that our hopes were not well-founded and our pleas have once again been ignored," Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria said, responding to a six-day meeting of Episcopal Church bishops that ended a day earlier in New Orleans.

"Instead of the change of heart (repentance) we sought, what we have been offered is merely a temporary adjustment in an unrelenting determination" to make the rest of the global Anglican Communion, as the worldwide church is called, think the same way as its U.S. branch, Akinola said in a statement issued from his office and circulated to American media.

What the Episcopal bishops came up with was not a "whole-hearted embrace of traditional Christian teaching" and it lacked the clarity and unambiguity that he and other leading Anglican bishops had sought from the U.S. church in a statement issued during a meeting earlier this year in Tanzania.

Akinola is a leader of the traditionalists in the "Global South" -- African, Asian and Latin American congregations who make up more than half the world's Anglican followers.

The U.S. bishops wound up their meeting on Tuesday promising to urge restraint in elevating gays or lesbians to the position of bishop and said they would not authorize rites to be used for the blessing of same-sex marriages.

The positions did not go far beyond those already taken by the 2.4-million-member U.S. church.

At the Tanzania meeting leading Anglican bishops, or primates, from around the world "requested" that the U.S. branch of the church make it clear by Sept. 30 that it would not ordain another openly gay person as a bishop and would not allow the blessing of same-sex unions.

The 2003 Episcopal Church consecration of Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, the first bishop known to be in an openly gay relationship in more than four centuries of church history, has rent both the U.S. church and the 77-million-member Anglican Communion.

NOT BANNED

In New Orleans the bishops of the U.S. church reaffirmed a resolution passed by its general convention in the summer of 2006 calling on those picking candidates for bishop to choose people who would not offend the wider church, and the bishops said that included gays and lesbians.

But there was no outright pledge to ban another consecration of a gay person should one be elected bishop.

On the issue of blessing same-sex unions the U.S. bishops said they "pledge not to authorize for use in our dioceses any public rites of blessing of same-sex unions until a broader consensus emerges in the Communion ..."

They went on to say that such blessings are not happening in a widespread way and that the majority of bishops oppose them. But they did not pledge to ban them.

The U.S. bishops also expressed dismay that conservative bishops from Africa and elsewhere -- Akinola among them -- have been visiting in the United States uninvited and installing bishops loyal to their orthodox views.