THE Anglican Church came closer to schism last night after 14 evangelical archbishops condemned the Church of England as evil and singled out the Archbishop of Canterbury for personal attack.

The “Global South” primates are headed by the ultra-conservative Nigerian archbishop, Dr Peter Akinola. They include the influential Archbishop of the West Indies, the Most Rev Drexel Gomez.

In a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, on the opening day of the General Synod in London, the Global South primates criticise his leadership and urge him to rethink his personal, liberal views on homosexuality.

They suggest that his “personal dissent” from the consensus of the wider Church that “same-sex sex is unacceptable” has prevented him from taking the necessary steps to confront the US and Canadian churches.

In their letter, published on the Global South website last night, they take Dr Williams to task for failing to act against the “unrepented sexual immorality” that they say is responsible for the Church’s divisions.

“The essence of libertinism is the severing of the grace of Christ from His moral commandments,” they say. “This, we believe, is at the heart of our present divisions.” They argue that the Church of England should have sought an exemption from the Civil Partnerships Act, which comes into effect next month, permitting gay partnerships to be registered legally, including clergy partnerships.

They say that they are troubled by Dr Williams’s reluctance to use his moral authority to challenge the US Episcopal Church and the Canadian Anglican Church to call for the cessation of ordinations of active homosexuals and the cessation of same-sex blessings. They demand that he issue these churches with a warning and threaten them with exclusion from the 2008 Lambeth Conference, the ten-yearly gathering of bishops, unless they “truly repent”.

The letter, in which the archbishops refer to Europe as a spiritual desert, emerged hours after Dr Williams made a speech to the synod, urging opponents in the gay debate to talk and pray with each other to help to resolve the divisions.

In a further development that will hasten the Church’s disintegration, the Nigerian Church also announced that it had formed a “covenant” with breakaway traditionalists in the US. The aim is to move towards “full communion” with the traditionalists in the recently merged Reformed Episcopal Church and Anglican Province of America. The covenant represents a direct challenge to the authority of Dr Williams and to the standing of the Church of England as the “mother” church of the Anglican Communion.

A spokesman for Dr Williams said: “If this letter is a contribution to the debate to which the church is committed, then it is to be welcomed. If it is an attempt to foreclose that debate, it would seem to serve very little purpose indeed.”

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