Bishops from 13 Anglican and Episcopal groups in North America announced Friday that they had formed a partnership as the first step to creating a rival to the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The announcement by the group, the Common Cause Partnership, marks a widening of the fissures within the Episcopal Church and in the greater communion over the churchÂ’s liberal stance on homosexuality. Earlier in the week in New Orleans, the bishops of the Episcopal Church defied a directive by leaders of the Anglican Communion asking them to set up an alternate structure for conservative churches, to stop consecrating openly gay and lesbian bishops and to ban the blessing of same-sex unions.
At the end of a three-day meeting in Pittsburgh, the College of Bishops of the Common Cause Partnership announced a timeline for organization and a plan to appeal to individual archbishops in the global Communion for recognition as the true representative of Anglicanism in North America. Some Common Cause bishops attended the New Orleans meeting but left early. “We declare clearly that we are taking this as a first step in the formation of the separate ecclesiastical structure in North America,” the partnership’s bishops said in a statement.
The Rev. Jan Nunley, a spokeswoman for the Episcopal Church, said such breakaway groups had tried to form at different times over the last 30 years, with little success. “Every one of them has splintered into competing factions within a short time,” Ms. Nunley