The US Episcopal Church has agreed to halt the ordination of gay bishops and the blessing of same-sex unions, straining to try to prevent a painful split in the global Anglican Communion.
The Church leaders who bowed to international pressure on those issues, however, also vowed late on Tuesday to continue to fight for the recognition of the civil rights of homosexuals.
"I have no doubt that the General Convention [in 2009] will revisit these issues," Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori said.
The more liberal stance of the Episcopalian leadership has divided congregations within the US and threatened a split within the 77 million-member worldwide communion.
"This resolution really is the result of finding common ground to stand on," Jefferts Schori said. "Not everyone was 100 percent happy with every word in this document, as you might imagine. But together we believe that we have found a place that all of us can stand together."
Tuesday's decision came just days before a deadline imposed by global leaders who had threatened that relations would be "damaged at best" if the US Church did not reverse its liberal stance on the homosexuality issue.
The leaders of the 2.3 million US Episcopalians said they made the decision "with the hope of mending the tear in the fabric" of the communion.
The Episcopal House of Bishops reaffirmed its decision to "exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion."
The Church's leaders also pledged "not to authorize or use in our dioceses any public rites of blessing of same-sex unions until a broader consensus emerges in the Communion or until [the] General Convention takes further action."
But it was not clear whether clergy would be allowed to carry out unauthorized blessings of same-sex unions.
The statement noted that clergy have a pastoral duty to "respond with love and understanding to the people of all sexual orientations ... [and] maintain a breadth of private responses to situations of individual pastoral care."
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