Gay and women's rights 'won't split church'

Gay and women's rights 'won't split church'
Brisbane Courier Mail,  Australia 

ANGLICAN Primate Phillip Aspinall, leader of the nation's four million Anglicans, has played down the possibility the Australian church could split from its English counterpart over issues such as gay priests and the ordination of women bishops.

Leading Sydney layman Robert Tong last week gave notice of a motion for debate at the diocese's annual synod to change the national constitution to allow for severing the automatic relationship with the Church of England in England over sexual matters.

"I think a large part of the church in Australia would be reluctant to lose its very close connection with the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury, even if such a move got support in Sydney and that remains to be seen," Dr Aspinall, who is also Archbishop of Brisbane, said.

"Whether it got sufficient support on a national scale in Australia to result in a change to the constitution I think is a very open question."

If the motion, expected to be put tomorrow night in Sydney, is passed, the earliest the matter could be considered by the Australian church as a whole would be at the next general synod, due in 2007.

Dr Aspinall also demurred when asked whether there may be a split in the Australian church between a liberal stream and the more conservative stream, characterised by the views of the Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen.

"I don't think it will happen and I'm working hard to ensure it doesn't happen," Dr Aspinall said. "There is a large centre in the church, and then on the edges there is room for differences of view and opinion, and disagreement does not mean disintegration."

He thought women bishops were "pretty inevitable" because just under two-thirds of Anglicans in Australia believed it was right to ordain women.

Dr Aspinall reiterated his earlier, much-publicised concerns about the Howard Government's industrial relations legislation.

He said he had been neither annoyed nor hurt when Peter Costello had said he was not qualified to comment on industrial relations.

"I thought it wasn't a very thoughtful thing to have said," he said.

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