Conservative Episcopalians plot separate church

By Jonathan Barnes

PITTSBURGH (Reuters) - Conservative bishops upset with U.S. Episcopal Church stands on gay issues said on Friday they will call a constitutional convention to form a new "Anglican union" in North America.

"This is a time of reformation," said Robert Duncan, Episcopal Church bishop of Pittsburgh who convened the group. "We hope to go through this in a way that brings honor and glory to God."

He and others meeting as the "Common Cause Council of Bishops" said the group included 51 bishops and bishops-elect representing "tens of thousands of Anglicans in North America."

There are currently about 2.4 million members of the Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of the 77 million-member global Anglican Communion, as the worldwide church is called.

Duncan and the others said they will form a new "college of bishops" that will ask top bishops abroad to recognize them as separate from the Episcopalians, and "call a founding constitutional convention for an Anglican union."

The U.S. church has been divided within and estranged from parts of the global church since 2003 when it consecrated Gene Robinson of New Hampshire as the first bishop known to be in an openly gay relationship in more than four centuries of church history.

That angered Duncan and other U.S. traditionalists as well as defenders of orthodox Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America, who now account for more than half of the world's Anglican followers.

Earlier this year, leading worldwide Anglican bishops, called primates, met in Africa and called on the U.S. church to clearly pledge not to elevate another noncelibate gay to bishop and to make it clear that blessing same-sex marriages would not be tolerated.