The Church of England won’t allow same-sex weddings to take place in church, but will allow priests to bless couples who have married in a civil ceremony, the latest chapter in a continuing debate over LGBT rights across various Christian churches.
After a six-year debate on the issue, the church said Wednesday that bishops had decided not to change the Church’s fundamental teaching “that holy matrimony is between one man and one woman for life.” It said the blessing by a priest was the furthest it could go without changing church doctrine.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, said the move would “appear to go too far for some and not nearly far enough for others,” but said he hoped it would be seen as a change for the common good. The church said it also planned to apologize later this week to “LGBTQI+ people for the ‘rejection, exclusion and hostility’ they have faced in churches and the impact this has had on their lives.”
Debates over homosexuality have roiled the Anglican Communion, a global family of churches with an estimated 100 million members. While the Church of England is the historical progenitor, it doesn’t exercise authority over other members of the Anglican Communion, unlike the Catholic Church which has a governing structure.
A number of Anglican churches, including the Episcopal Church in the U.S., permit same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly gay clergy. Elsewhere in the U.K., the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland both allow same-sex weddings. The Anglican Church in Wales allows blessings of same-sex relationships but not same-sex marriage.
But many Anglican churches in Africa and elsewhere in the global south oppose those practices on the grounds that they are contrary to Scripture. Last summer, bishops from Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda—which represent an estimated 44 million of the world’s 100 million Anglicans, according to the World Christian Database—boycotted the Lambeth Conference, the periodic gathering of Anglican leaders, to protest the presence of churches with liberal teaching and practice on homosexuality.
A prominent advocate for same-sex marriage in the Church of England criticized the bishops’ decision on Wednesday.
“The inconsistency and incoherence of their proposals should be obvious to everyone and will please no one, neither the…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at WSJ.com: World News…