The boy from the Welsh valleys was tubby with red hair. The lad from Durham was leaner and darker. Both wanted to be priests and both were ambiguous about their sexuality. When they met at a theological college in Oxford 27 years ago, it was a defining moment in their lives. They have been in a loving relationship ever since.

However, that has now triggered another defining moment. The appointment of one of them, red-haired Canon Jeffrey John, as a bishop has provoked a potentially catastrophic row within the Church of England about the large number of homosexuals among the clergy.

Although John’s “life partnership” with his friend from Durham, Grant Holmes, is the cause of the dispute, the man at the heart of it is Rowan Williams, the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

The large and active evangelical wing of the church, which argues that the Bible condemns homosexuality, suspects Williams of a liberal agenda to promote gay priests.

In turn Williams denies being behind John’s appointment as Bishop of Reading — an auxiliary post within the diocese of Oxford — but he is determined to go ahead with it. Liberal members of the church hope that by facing down the conservative evangelicals, Williams will enable many gay priests to come out of the closet.

The battle is not only about homosexuality. About one-third of England’s clergy are broadly evangelical and have long warned that the liberalisation of the C of E will cause “anarchy and division”. Ranked against them, the liberal clergy believe the church must modernise or risk becoming obsolete.

The gay issue has replaced the ordination of women as the key factor in this long feud — and it is proving so bitterly divisive that churchmen on both sides fear it will destroy the 470-year-old institution.

HOW has it come to this? After all, homosexuality is now broadly accepted in British society. There have been openly gay MPs in the cabinet and it will hardly be news to anyone that there is a large number of gay vicars in the C of E.

“I would estimate that up to a third of the Church of England’s clergy are gay,” said an insider. “Of those nearly half are in some sort of partnership. But a majority keep that a secret and some go to extraordinary lengths to disguise their relationships.”

As one senior clergyman noted last week: “The Church of England is good at talking about truth, but hopeless about honesty.”

Peter Stanford, a writer on religious affairs, points out: “Go on the annual Anglo- Catholic pilgrimage to the Marian shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk and you enter a high camp world where every priest has a ‘name in religion’ — ie a woman’s name.

“Until now these gay vicars have been out, but not quite out. So while they’re happy to go to church functions with their partners as a couple, they don’t greet parishioners on the steps of the church on Sunday with ‘Hello, I’m the gay vicar — meet my boyfriend’.”

John is not the first homosexual to be appointed as a bishop. Church sources say that the closet gays on the senior staff of the diocese of London include a bishop, an assistant bishop, three archdeacons and a senior adviser.

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