ON SUNDAY (Radio 4), a report on the Gafcon Mini Conference in Abuja followed a visit to the gathering by Emily Buchanan, one of the programme’s presenters. I was left feeling that I would rather have had more bang for that buck. Some of the interviews lacked the necessary punchiness.
The interviewer, Bara’atu Ibrahim, left the General Secretary of Gafcon, the Rt Revd Paul Donison, unchallenged when he said that Gafcon was seeing “a lot of people coming from other denominations”. Is there any evidence of this? And, if there is, surely it raises the question whether Gafcon is an Anglican body or an ecumenical conservative ginger group. Could he have been asked for more specifically what his demands to “exercise the discipline of the Church” might entail?
For her part, Ms Ibrahim asked Bishop Donison about his being “consecrated as Bishop of Rwanda”: accuracy and precision matter in journalism, and most especially in specialist journalism.
There was much talk from Bishop Donison about the “Jerusalem Declaration”, without any explanation of what it was — although, apparently, Gafcon members cannot be in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury unless she signs it; and there were demands that Archbishop Mullally “show repentance” — with his telling us what she was to repent of, although we all know that it’s being too nice to gays.
It was left to the general-secretary of the Anglican Communion, the Rt Revd Anthony Poggo, to point out that two of the three members of Gafcon’s ruling troika were from Churches that have never been part of the Anglican Communion.
Ms Buchanan says that, in Abuja, she was told not to call this a schism. Gafcon has yet to produce a list of Churches who support the troika’s leadership. The upcoming meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in Belfast will show us how intact the Communion truly is: more than is often presumed, I suspect.
On the theme of countries that are hostile to homosexuality, the book of the week on Friday Evening with Geoff Norcott (Times Radio) was The Ayatollah’s Gaze, by Majid Parsa. Mr Parsa, now living in the UK, proved an articulate guide to the hidden gay life of Iran, a country in which people are flogged and executed regularly not just for gay sex, but merely for being out of the closet.
Brought up in a devout Muslim family, Mr Parsa grew up chanting “Death to America”, but said that his homosexuality eventually led him to leave Islam. He reported varying degrees of social acceptance in different sections of Iranian society; both awareness and acceptance of homosexuality have increased in recent years. Gay women have taken longer to come out of the closet.
I was disappointed that Mr Norcott did not enquire about either Mr Parsa’s personal journey to self-acceptance, or ask for any interesting anecdotes from Tehran’s closeted scene.
