Via Media

The London Times Online reported on May 29 on a new proposal regarding gay clergy in the Church of England:

“Homosexual priests in the Church of England will be allowed to ‘marry’ their boyfriends under a proposal drawn up by senior bishops, led by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

“The decision ensures that gay and lesbian clergy who wish to register relationships under the new ‘civil partnerships’ law ?Egiving them many of the tax and inheritance advantages of married couples ?Ewill not lose their licences to be priests.

“They will, however, have to give an assurance to their diocesan bishop that they will abstain from sex. The bishops are trying to uphold the church doctrine of forbidding clergy from sex except in a full marriage. They accept, however, that the new law leaves them little choice but to accept the right of gay clergy to have civil partners.”

Exactly whom this is supposed to satisfy is unfathomable. If gay marriage is actually marriage, and if sex takes place within marriage, then how can the church require celibacy? But this endorsement of gay marriage is going to further the exodus from the Anglican church worldwide.

Anglicanism’s liturgical and theological via media has been mostly a success story, holding together Puritan and Laudian in the “same” church for centuries. The only possible result of this inane attempt to split the difference will be to split an already splintering church.