Anglican Bishop Peter Coffin has allowed a married lesbian to work as a priest in Ottawa, incurring the wrath of a small but vociferous group of conservatives within the Anglican diocese.

One church has withheld about $36,000 of its dues to the the diocese in protest and several clergy signed an open letter denouncing their bishop.

The letter said Bishop Coffin reneged on the spirit of the Anglican church's national moratorium on same-sex unions by allowing Rev. Linda Privitera to work as a priest at St. John the Evangelist on Elgin Street. Rev. Privitera is an American citizen, ordained and married in Massachusetts, who came to Canada with her partner in November.

Bishop Coffin has honoured the moratorium that suspended any church blessing of same-sex unions, but he says: "I cannot see (homosexuality) as a sin. ... We have swept this under the carpet and made people live in fear and in silence."

"I may be called a liberal and unorthodox," Bishop Coffin said in an e-mail to the Citizen. "But I firmly believe that people need to be treated with respect and dignity and that loving someone faithfully and in total commitment until death do them part is a blessing regardless of sexual orientation."

With that statement, Bishop Coffin has placed himself firmly on one side of a debate, which is dividing Anglicans worldwide, over what it means to be Christian. The struggle could crack the church apart as liberals and conservatives increasingly see each other as veering into sin, and raise the alarms against each other accordingly.

Trouble has been percolating for years as churches in North America and Europe welcomed same-sex couples and gay clergy, sometimes with open arms, sometimes by simply looking the other way.

But Canada has only 700,000 Anglicans, and the U.S. about 2.2 million, of the world's 77 million Anglicans, most of whom live in the southern hemisphere, where many bishops argue homosexuality is an abomination and forbidden by the Bible.

These same bishops are no longer prepared to be ignored at international synods, and have aligned with the Christian right in North America to create a formidable force here.

Orthodox Anglicans maintain the church is wandering away from scripture by condoning sexuality outside heterosexual marriage. To them, the question is not so much whether homosexuality is a sin, but whether the Anglican church sees scripture as the ultimate authority.

Some conservative churches have broken with their diocese, aligning instead with southern bishops. Eight B.C. churches and three in Saskatchewan are now affiliated with the church in Rwanda, which is also firmly opposed to homosexuality. Some of the Canadian churches have tried to take ownership of their church property and buildings with them.

Most of this storm was blowing over Ottawa until Rev. Privitera arrived in November and Bishop Coffin gave her a temporary licence to practise as a priest. One of the signatories to the open letter was Rev. George Sinclair, a leader of Anglican Essentials Canada, a group trying to bring the Anglican Church back to its original orthodoxy.

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