Second conservative bishop leaves Canada Anglicans

A second retired bishop with conservative views left the Anglican Church of Canada on Thursday over its position on homosexuality and will serve in Canada under the authority of the more orthodox archbishop in Argentina.

"My heart yearns for revival in Canada and in Anglicanism but I have lost hope for reformation within the Anglican Church of Canada," Bishop Malcolm Harding, who had served in Manitoba, said in a statement.

"I now realize that we cannot have unity at the expense of truth. I cannot in conscience travel the path that the Anglican Church of Canada is traveling, away from historic Christian teaching and established Anglican practice."

He will help represent Western Canada under Bishop Don Harvey, who announced last Friday he would come out of retirement to offer oversight to conservative Canadian Anglicans under Gregory Venables, archbishop of the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone of the Americas.

They are protesting the blessing of gay marriages, practiced in certain congregations in the British Columbia diocese of New Westminster and advocated in three other Canadian dioceses.

The liberal bishop of New Westminster, Michael Ingham, complained on Tuesday that Harvey would be violating the church's constitution if he ordains any people in New Westminster without his authority.

"This is a full-blown schism now within the Canadian church and it is a direct attack upon the catholicity of the church and the gospel of Jesus Christ," he said.

Harvey has said Ingham cannot ignore Anglican constitutional prohibitions on blessings of homosexual marriage on the one hand, and then complain about constitutional rules on jurisdiction.

Harvey says 18 to 20 congregations might pull out and put themselves under Venables. Separately, another 12 congregations have put themselves under the authority of conservative African archbishops.