By Tim Waggoner
LONDON, ON, June 2, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The homosexualist agenda, having already caused mass division in the worldwide Anglican Communion, has now worked its way into the Anglican diocese of Huron, Ontario in the form of special liturgies celebrating homosexuality and the homosexual lifestyle.
The May 25th edition of the Anglican Journal describes how Bishop Robert Bennet of the Huron diocese in Southern Ontario, commissioned a doctrine and worship committee to “synthesize and make available the most recent and relevant material to aid in this discernment.” The committee was then charged to “develop appropriate protocols, guidelines and evaluative tools to enable us to move forward with appropriate liturgies to celebrate the love, mutual fidelity and support that gay and lesbian Anglicans model every day for the church and wider community.”
Bishop Bennet said that the new services will not involve “nuptial blessing” but will be “eucharistic in nature with approved intercessory prayers.”
While the Anglican Consultative Council, the Lambeth Conference of bishops, and the Archbishop of Canterbury have all requested that Anglican leaders resist specifically blessing same-sex unions, the Canadian national leadership has appeared to indicate otherwise.
In his letter to the Huron diocese synod, which met at the end of May to discuss the issue, the bishop alluded to this fact. He said that he was “quite torn on the issue … On the one hand, I agree with the national house of bishops’ desire to ‘develop the most generous pastoral response possible within the current teaching of the church’. On the other hand, my catholic sensitivity of whom we are as church mandates that I take very seriously the Archbishop of Canterbury’s request that we embrace a ‘season of gracious restraint’ in the matter of same-gender blessings.”
The Anglican Church of Canada will meet next in Halifax in 2010.