Bishop Gene was speaking at the annual conference of the Modern Churchpeople’s Union held in Hertfordshire and chaired by the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan.

He warned that telling gay people to go to some churches was akin to telling an abused wife to go back to her husband. He also compared the church’s attitude to him as that to parents whose son or daughter tells them they are coming out. He said:

“What is happening now in the Anglican Communion is what happens in a family when a kid comes out. It goes through a process of grieving and resistance to change until it can find a revised world view. .This church is not ours to win or lose, it is God’s church . It may be looking pretty rough now but God will take care of it. It may look a bit different in the end but God is not going to abandon his church so we don’t need to be so afraid.

“We are not at liberty to think we are on the selection committee for God’s family, our job is to be on the welcome committee and the sooner we learn that in the Anglican Communion the better off we will be.

“I don’t believe God stopped revealing himself when the canon of scripture was closed. God promises to be with us and never let us go. We are promised that the spirit will lead us into all truth. I believe that God is now leading us to the full inclusion of people of all types of sexuality. Maybe where we’re headed is just to acknowledge that all of us are incredibly diverse and God loves us all.”

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Going through a stack of books on the coffee table in his office, the Rev. Briane Turley finds a copy of “The Next Christendom.”

Written in 2002, it predicts that Christians from non-Western countries will soon outnumber believers in North America and Europe.

When that happens, the book concludes, it will trigger a religious upheaval as big as the Reformation.

“I’ve seen it coming true,” Turley says, “right before my eyes.”

He recently came back from the Global Anglican Future Conference, or GAFCON, in Jerusalem. Being white and Western, Turley found himself conspicuously in the minority.

“This is where the leaders of the church in Africa stood up and said, ‘OK, we’re taking our place at the table now.'”

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Pope Benedict XVI said Saturday that he is praying there will not be any more rifts in the Anglican community following the recent Church of England decision on women bishops.

Answering questions from journalists aboard his flight to Australia, Benedict touched briefly on the turmoil in the Anglican church.

“I am praying so that there are no more schisms and fractures” within the Anglican community, Benedict said.

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Barely had the votes of the General Synod been counted when senior clergymen (and they were, indeed, men rather than women of the cloth) began to complain that the church was, in the words of one traditionalist, “mean-spirited and shortsighted” in rejecting the idea of so-called superbishops to oversee those parishes opposed to female bishops.

There was talk – increasingly common in the worldwide Anglican Communion – of schism, of rebel clerics abandoning their ministry within the Church of England to march toward the Church of Rome, reversing the historic split within Christendom inspired by Henry VIII in the 16th century.

For centuries, the break with Rome molded the identity of many English worshipers, and yielded a central element of the Anglican self-perception as tolerant, pragmatic and, most of all, independent. Now, for some, the Vatican itself – profoundly opposed to female clergy – offers a beacon of faith.

The Anglican Communion claims a global membership of almost 80 million, an increasingly fractious body riven by debates between reformers and traditionalists, pulled this way and that by the liberalism of the Episcopal Church in the United States and by the conservatism of many African church leaders.

But the debate about the appointment of female bishops in the Church of England – the historical wellspring of the communion – seemed curiously at odds with the practices that have become normal in many ordinary parishes, where the place of women in the church is not even an issue except at the level of theological debate.

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The federal government took control of Pasadena-based IndyMac Bank on Friday in what regulators called the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

Citing a massive run on deposits, regulators shut its main branch three hours early, leaving customers stunned and upset. One woman leaned on the locked doors, pleading with an employee inside: “Please, please, I want to take out a portion.” All she could do was read a two-page notice taped to the door.

The bank’s 33 branches will be closed over the weekend, but the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will reopen the bank on Monday as IndyMac Federal Bank, said the Office of Thrift Supervision in Washington. Customers will not be able to bank by phone or Internet over the weekend, regulators said, but can continue to use ATMs, debit cards and checks. Normal branch hours, online banking and phone banking services are to resume Monday.

Federal authorities estimated that the takeover of IndyMac, which had $32 billion in assets, would cost the FDIC $4 billion to $8 billion. Regulators said deposits of up to $100,000 were safe and insured by the FDIC. The agency’s insurance fund has assets of about $52 billion.

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Bishop Burnham predicted there would be defections among Anglo”“Catholic clergy and laity because of the July 7 ruling by the General Synod of the Church of England, the mother church of the Anglican Communion, to move ahead with plans to allow the ordination of women bishops. Anglo”“Catholics are those whose customs and practices within Anglicanism emphasize continuity with Catholic tradition.

The bishop recently traveled to Rome to discuss the reception of large numbers of dissenting Anglican traditionalists with Cardinal William J. Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

He was joined by Anglican Bishop Keith Newton of Richborough, England, also a flying bishop of the Canterbury Archdiocese.

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The Bishop of Europe, the Rt Rev Geoffrey Rowell, said he would attend but could not take part in a Eucharist service held by the female head of the Episcopal Church of the USA, the Most Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori.

He added that he was “astonished” that so little information about events at Lambeth had been given out so far.

“We know the themes for each day and that we shall be in study groups of eight, but not much else.”

The Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Rev Nicholas Reade, added: “I too am very surprised that we have had little more than a sketchy outline. I’ve never been to a conference before where we have had such little information.”

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Back in 2002, before all the trouble, the Rev. Paul Ouderkirk retired from St. Bridget’s Roman Catholic Church here, his last station in 43 years of ministry. He built a home 35 miles away in a town along the Mississippi, and he indulged a passion for family history, tracing his lineage to an ancestor who arrived in New Amsterdam with the Dutch East India Company.

Once a month or so, Father Ouderkirk drove back to St. Bridget’s to officiate at a wedding or baptize a baby. He savored those rituals, proof that the Hispanic immigrants who had arrived over the past decade to work in Postville’s kosher-meat plant were setting down roots. Some had bought their own homes. Their children had graduated from high school, even been selected for the National Honor Society.

Then came the morning of May 12, when both satisfaction and retirement ended for the 75-year-old priest. Federal immigration agents raided the Agriprocessors factory, arresting nearly 400 workers, most of them men, for being in the United States illegally. Within minutes of the raid, with surveillance helicopters buzzing above the leafy streets, the wives and children of Mexican and Guatemalan families began trickling into St. Bridget’s church, the safest place they knew.

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