Uruguay votes to quit Southern Cone: The Church of England Newspaper, Nov 19, 2010 p 8. November 22, 2010
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, La Iglesia Anglicana del Cono Sur de America.trackback
Bishop Miguel Tamayo of Uruguay
First published in The Church of England Newspaper.
The Diocese of Uruguay has voted to secede from the Province of the Southern Cone.
On Nov 12 an extraordinary session of the diocesan synod meeting in Montevideo endorsed a resolution proposed by the diocesan council to quit the province and seek alternative metropolitan oversight. The vote was taken in response to last month’s vote by the provincial synod rejecting the ordination of women priests.
Uruguay had proposed the women priest resolution, which was passed by the lay and episcopal orders, but defeated in the clergy order at the provincial synod in Buenos Aires. Uruguay had “sought to allow a diocesan option in the matter, rather than Provincial wide adoption, so that the diocese could proceed to minister within a very difficult agnostic milieu. Uruguay felt that after a nine year hiatus since the last vote for approval, a patient wait would be rewarded. That was not the result and so the Uruguayan Synod took this measure to move away from the Province,” provincial spokesman Bishop Frank Lyons of Bolivia said in a statement given to the press.
The diocese requested permission for transfer out of the province within the year. If permission to quit the Southern Cone was not granted, Uruguay would appeal the matter to the Anglican Consultative Council, Bishop Lyons said.
The Bishop of Uruguay, the Rt. Rev. Miguel Tamayo, who also serves as interim Bishop of Cuba which has women priests and has had two women bishops told CEN the decision to quit the province was not his along. “The way I lead the diocese, is not for me alone to respond” he said, noting it was “a matter for the whole diocese, through its synod.”
The diocese will now wait upon the province for its response, Bishop Tamayo said. “According to the provincial canons the only thing we can do is to transmit [our request], first [to] the province, and later, if it does not work, direct with the ACC, to be under another metropolitan authority. We are hopeful that our Anglican structures will work,” he said.
Uruguay has often been the “odd man out” within the province of the Southern Cone, and has kept its links to the US and Canadian churches after the rest of the province broke relations following the Gene Robinson affair.
Uruguay will be the second South American diocese to attempt to secede from its province. Disputes over doctrine and discipline led the conservative Diocese of Recife to secede from the liberal Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil [IEAB] and seek the metropolitan oversight of the Southern Cone in 2007 after its bishop and the majority of its clergy were deposed for contumacy. The IEAB responded to the defection by recognizing the ten percent of the diocese that remained loyal to the province as the true Diocese of Recife. With a liberal diocese now seeking to withdraw from a conservative province, the scene is now set for a repeat of the Recife crisis, unless an amicable resolution can be reached.
