The Diocese of Huron’s Bishop Robert Bennett is unhappy that the Anglican Church of Canada is divided over marrying same-sex couples. At least, he claims to be.

It’s hard to believe he is crying anything but crocodile tears, though, since Bennett willingly contributed to the division by authorising same-sex blessings in 2013 and same-sex marriages in 2016. Does this make him a hypocrite? You decide.

From here:

Among the most troubling things he witnessed as bishop, Bennett said, was the divisiveness caused by the issue of human sexuality.

“I think it’s taken a great toll both within congregations and the House of Bishops,” he said. “That issue—and it’s still there—is always front and centre in the house, and it makes it very difficult for me, and I think everybody else, to embrace and focus on what we’re really about as church.”

Discord over human sexuality came to a head in the diocese of Huron only a matter of weeks after Bennett became diocesan bishop, when members of St. Aidan’s Church, in Windsor, voted to leave the Anglican Church of Canada and join the conservative Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC). Members were upset about recent moves in some dioceses to bless same-sex unions. In 2011, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that the parish could not legally separate itself from the diocese.

Bennett said he had also found it difficult to see the shrinking of congregations in the diocese, attributable partly to declining populations in some areas and partly to the “vortex of change” set in motion by the secularization of culture.