Archbishop warns of Anglican split on gays

Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen issued yesterday the strongest warning yet that conservatives are ready to split with the Anglican church over gay bishops.

Archbishop Jensen, along with traditionalist primates from Africa and Asia, is one of the fiercest critics of the US Episcopal Church's decision to ordain openly gay bishop Gene Robinson.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the world's 77 million Anglicans, has been struggling at a week-long summit of church leaders in Northern Ireland to keep the fractured communion together.

But his call for calm may have fallen on deaf ears.

"The idea that we break from one another is a painful one, and very, very sorrowful," Archbishop Jensen said.

"But there do come times when the authority of the Bible is at stake - and this is one of those times - where to stay together becomes a great difficulty," he told BBC Radio.

Archbishop Williams concedes that the gay bishop crisis has badly damaged Anglicanism's fragile unity. "There will be no cost-free outcome from this," he has said.

The crisis erupted in 2003 with Bishop Robinson's ordination in the US, home to 2.3 million Anglicans known as Episcopalians.

The decision enraged traditionalists, particularly in Africa, who demanded the Americans repent and are now studying ways to redraw the Anglican world map to exclude liberal provinces and put US conservatives under foreign bishops.

African church leaders fear that if Anglicanism takes a lenient line on homosexuality, its followers will desert its pews for more conservative Christian churches or Islam.

Archbishop Jensen indicated that the patience of conservative clerics was wearing thin.

"I hope we can stay together. I am hoping there will be reconciliation and a turning back again to what the Bible says," he said.