The reason the bishops blocked the change was not mysterious. The vast majority of Anglicans now live in the Third World. Their African and Asian bishops have warned the American Episcopalian (i.e., Anglican) Church that it must either "repent" or face expulsion from the Anglican communion. This was their response to the decision of the Episcopalians to consecrate an openly homosexual bishop and to bless homosexual unions.

Not only were the Third World bishops acutely conscious that biblical and Catholic Christianity have always rejected homosexual practice, but they also saw their church being scorned by ever-threatening Islam as a sodomist religion, dedicated to the proposition that whatever feels good must be good and should therefore be blessed by God.

The Canadian church, leaning in the same direction as the American, and with one bishop already defying church discipline and authorizing same-sex marriage, very nearly followed the American precedent. Indeed, it resolved earlier last week that gay marriage would not offend the "core doctrine" of its teaching.

But if it had had gone the whole way and blessed gay unions, the church would have suffered, along with the Americans, what one bishop called "a de facto impairment of the communion." In other words, it could not consider itself fully Anglican.

However, even with this decision, the issue is far from resolved. Prior to the vote four retired Canadian Anglican archbishops issued a statement urging the church to bless gay marriages. But when one of the four, Terry Finlay, retired archbishop of Toronto, took part in a gay marriage ceremony, his successor lifted Finlay's license to perform any marriages at all.

And what, one wonders, will Michael Ingham, the Anglican bishop in Vancouver, now do? He had authorized gay marriages, and many had been performed in his diocese. How can these people now be considered as "married in the church" when the church doesn't allow such marriages? And will Finlay countermand his earlier decree, or will he let it stand and thereby challenge the authority of the synod.? And if other bishops do the same and are not disciplined, will the disapprobation of the Third World bishops fall on the Canadian church regardless of the synod's decision?

This is the kind of circus over which Bishop Fred Hiltz of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island was chosen ringmaster earlier in the week when he was elected primate, the church's senior ecclesiastical office. Before the marriage vote was taken, he was asked: Did he not fear individual parishes would vote themselves out of the church if same-sex marriages were approved? He hoped that would not happen, he said. "I would encourage people to stay at the table. I think that's the Lord's will, that we remain at the table and in conversation."

"Leaving the table," however, was something Anglicans in the thousands have been doing for nearly 40 years. A century ago, the Anglican Church was the largest Protestant Church in Canada, and in Ontario it fulfilled the role, if not of the established church, at least as the church of the establishment. In the 1920s, it slipped to second place after the Methodists, Congregationalists and most Presbyterians merged to form the United Church of Canada. But Anglicanism continued to grow until the 1960s, then began a calamitous decline.

In the last census, 2 million Canadians still listed themselves as Anglicans, but church membership rolls can account for only 800,000, and on any given Sunday 300,000 at most turn up in the pews.

This decline in membership and attendance precisely paralleled the church's turn to liberal theology and to whatever-turns-your-crank sexual morality. Always these "progressive" changes were advanced as "the way to bring the young people in." They haven't. But what will? That, not gay marriage, is Fred Hiltz's real problem.

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