ONE of religion’s more palatable exponents, South Africa’s likable and genial Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is on the wireless on Tuesday night, having a knock at the Anglican Church and its leadership for its attitudes towards homosexuality.

In an interview with BBC Radio 4, he says the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has failed to demonstrate that God is “welcoming”. The Radio Times online listing for the programme says,

Michael Buerk reports on the divide over homosexuality in the worldwide Anglican Church. Archbishop Desmond Tutu gives vent to his feelings of shame over homophobia. His critics, who include former Archbishop [of Canterbury] George Carey, [Catholic convert] Ann Widdecombe and US Bishop Robert Duncan, stand up for a church which they see as working worldwide on behalf of the poor and deprived. The differences threaten to surface at next year’s Lambeth Conference.

And it’s a conference that just might provide some controversy, with the likes of Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali threatening not to go if a certain American bishop who is one of those is there. We said on 12 October, “Nazir-Ali is now saying he may boycott Lambeth – not just if Robinson is there, but if those who chanted the mumbo-jumbo over him to change him into a bishop are there, too.”

In Tuesday’s interview, Tutu will also repeat accusations that the Church is “obsessed” with the issue of gay priests and should rather be focusing on global problems such as AIDS.

“Our world is facing problems – poverty, HIV and AIDS – a devastating pandemic, and conflict,” says the 76-year-old archbishop. “God must be weeping looking at some of the atrocities that we commit against one another. In the face of all of that, our Church, especially the Anglican Church, at this time is almost obsessed with questions of human sexuality.”
Of Rowan Williams, he asks, “Why doesn’t he demonstrate a particular attribute of God’s which is that God is a welcoming God?”

Tutu goes on to say the Anglican Church has seemed “extraordinarily homophobic” in its handling of the issue of Gene Robinson, the gay American bishop, and that he had felt “saddened” and “ashamed” of his church at the time of the hoo-ha over Robinson’s elevation to his post. Asked by the interviewer if he still feels ashamed, he says, “If we are going to not welcome or invite people because of sexual orientation, yes. If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn’t worship that God.”

In the interview, Tutu also takes a swipe at religious conservatives who say homosexuality is a choice. “It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It’s like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.”

The programme is called From Calvary to Lambeth and is scheduled to be on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, 27 November, at 8 p.m. UK time.