LONDON (AP) _ The Archbishop of Canterbury has asked conservative members of the Anglican Church not to belittle or harass gay people, and appealed for the worldwide communion to remain united despite strains over homosexuality. In a letter to Anglican leaders released Sunday by the archbishop’s Lambeth Palace office, Rowan Williams called for repentance from those who condemned homosexuals and said such behavior was “sinful.”
Amid the church’s ongoing rift about whether to ordain gay bishops and offer blessings to gay couples, Williams warned that condemnation of homosexuals could lead to physical violence.
“Any words that could make it easier for someone to attack or abuse a homosexual person are words of which we must repent,” Williams said in the letter sent Friday to 37 Anglican leaders around the world.
Williams also cautioned that the ongoing argument was causing homosexuals to feel alienated from the Anglican church.
“In the heat of this controversy things have been said about homosexual people that have made many of them, including those who lead celibate lives, feel that there is no good news for them in the church,” Williams wrote.
Gay issues have split the 77-million-member Anglican Communion. The ordination of an openly gay bishop in the U.S. Episcopal Church infuriated many bishops in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, as well as conservatives in Britain. They view gay relations as banned by Scripture.
Last month, a 17-member worldwide Anglican commission unanimously told the American church to stop promoting to bishop any people in same-sex unions “until some new consensus” emerges.
The church has also been split over whether to approve blessings for same-sex couples.
Williams noted that official Anglican policy “did not believe because of its reading of Scripture that it was free to say that homosexual practice could be blessed.”
“But it also declared that violence in word or deed and prejudice against homosexual people were unacceptable and sinful behavior for Christians,” he added.
Williams cautioned against individual national churches splitting from the communion, arguing that “God has given us a gift of something more than just a collection of local bodies.”
“We often forget the countless informal links that bind us, parish to parish, person to person, across the Communion in a way that would be so much harder to realize without our public and official links. It is surely worth working to honor this gift as best we can,” the archbishop wrote.