Archbishop Desmond Tutu: "Ashamed" to be Anglican

CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu says in a new book that his church’s rejection of gay priests in 1998 made him “ashamed to be an Anglican.”

That comment, as well as others critical of the worldwide Anglican Communion’s bickering over the role of gays and lesbians in the church, are related in a new biography of the South African prelate, called Rabble-Rouser for Peace, written by his former press secretary, John Allen. The biography is scheduled to be released close to Tutu’s 75th birthday in early October.

In the book, Tutu is candid about his gradual acknowledgment “that sexual orientation, like race or gender, was a given,” Allen writes.

Because he had retired as archbishop of Cape Town in 1996, Tutu refrained from public comment after Anglican prelates rejected “homosexual practice” as “incompatible with scripture,” in 1998. However, in a letter to the spiritual head of Anglicanism, former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, Tutu wrote, “I am ashamed to be an Anglican,” according to Allen.