Setting down his mitre in retirement last week, George Carey, 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury, bequeathed to his successor, Rowan Williams, a homosexual mess in the Anglican Church. The mess is largely of Most Rev. Carey's own making -- a rancorous division he might have contained if he'd followed the lead of Canada's bishops, but instead has exacerbated.

Dr. Carey called himself a symbol of unity for the world's 70 million Anglicans. But he leaves his post after 11 years having aggravated cultural and doctrinal divisions in a sect that for 400 years has prided itself on embracing all manner of theological difference, dissent and biblical interpretation. In his wake -- on the troubling matter of affording gays and lesbians full status as sexual beings within the church -- there is now talk of schism, of First World and Third World Anglicans going separate ways, of declarations from traditionalist, evangelical Anglicans that they no longer can inhabit one house with Anglican progressives.

All of which is a sad legacy for a gentle man who struggled mightily to keep breath in his own moribund Church of England, who succeeded in mending Anglicanism's other great fracture of recent years -- the ordination of women as priests -- and, who, more than any of his predecessors, has walked the world stage as a global religious leader.

Dr. Carey did not create Anglicanism's division on homosexuality. But as a gender traditionalist, he played a zealous role in hardening the fault line's edges. At the 1998 decennial Lambeth Conference of the world church's bishops, he forced a vote on ordaining practising homosexual priests and blessing same-sex unions, ignoring the recommendation of a bishops' committee representing all shades of Anglicanism that the issues be placed before the conference only for discussion. As he had anticipated, the vote was overwhelmingly negative.

His critics say he demanded that vote to replenish his depleted capital with Third World Anglicanism, which he'd lost on political and economic issues. He had angered African church leaders at Lambeth 1998 by introducing World Bank president James Wolfensohn as "my friend." Mr. Wolfensohn then gave an unexpectedly passionate speech attacking Third World opponents -- many of them sitting in his episcopal audience -- of the bank's stringent and controversial development policies.

Dr. Carey paid scant attention to an international commission of senior Anglican clergy that reported earlier this year, after three years' deliberation, that they could reach no consensus on homosexuality, but subsumed their differences in Christian love for one another.

At last month's meeting of the world Anglican Consultative Council in Hong Kong, Dr. Carey criticized by name Greater Vancouver's Bishop of New Westminster, Michael Ingham, who, after three votes by his diocesan governing body in favour of blessing same-sex unions, finally -- after painstaking deliberation -- gave his consent in June. (Bishop Ingham has said the ritual of blessing same-sex unions will not be the same as the sacrament of marriage. One Anglican liturgical expert, understandably speaking on condition of anonymity, drew a parallel to the ritual used in some Anglican churches to bless pets.)

Dr. Carey subsequently wrote a letter to New Westminster's dissident priests and parishes that they interpreted, without much difficulty, as supporting their opposition.

Then, several days ago, on the eve of a national meeting of Canadian bishops, he told a press conference in Toronto the Bible was unequivocally clear in condemning homosexuality and he urged the bishops to press Bishop Ingham and his diocese to rescind their decision.

Deepening the embarrassment was an article published around the same time in Britain's conservative Daily Telegraph. Reporters posing as homosexual couples found that many Anglican priests in England clandestinely but routinely bless same-sex unions in their churches (as do many priests in the United States and undoubtedly in Canada).

The only direct authority the Archbishop of Canterbury has is over the Anglican Church in England, of which he is primate. Elsewhere in the Anglican Communion -- as the world church is called -- he is primus inter pares, first among equals. Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, whose spiritual as well as secular leader is the Pope, the Anglican Communion is a body of 38 autonomous ecclesiastical provinces of which the Archbishop of Canterbury is traditionally president and for which the Lambeth Conference merely sets guidelines.

Canada's 37 Anglican bishops, representing four ecclesiastical provinces in the Communion, came to the same-sex union issue divided. A third of them already had given their names to a public statement opposing the diocese of New Westminster's action.

They struggled for three days before three-quarters of them arrived at much the same end as the international commission. Then they passed a motion saying they were divided and asked Bishop Ingham not to proceed with blessing same-sex unions until the national church's governing body, the general synod, considers the subject in 2004.

They voted for it knowing Bishop Ingham intends to proceed. He has said the backlash in his diocese -- with its large gay population, including gay refugees from Third World countries -- would be fiercely divisive if he does not go ahead. The motion has been interpreted as a do-nothing statement that "grandfathers" the Diocese of New Westminster.

That interpretation sells it short. The bishops who approved the motion made clear they voted to put the teachings of Jesus on love and acceptance of one another ahead of their theological and personal differences on homosexuality. Perhaps most ordinary Canadians don't talk in those terms. The bishops did.

And many of them voted to put pastoral care of Anglican homosexuals ahead of their church's guidelines and the convictions of their titular leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Said Calgary's Bishop Barry Hollowell: "It's not just an 'issue.' They're people, they're baptized Anglicans, and there's not a two-tier baptism in the Anglican Church."

As Michael Ingham said after the motion was passed, if the vote had been taken on blessing same-sex unions, it would have lost. But it wasn't. The bishops voted to maintain spiritual unity because the alternative was much worse.

The most powerful speech was made by Andrew Atagotaaluk, Bishop of the Arctic, who told of Inuit communities painfully divided by competing Anglican and Roman Catholic missionaries in the past and, more recently, by American pentecostal missionaries.

"There are no outsiders in those communities," he said. "They're all families." Knowing of that experience, he said, he would vote for the unity motion although he opposed what Michael Ingham had done.

George Carey didn't stay in Canada long enough to hear Andrew Atagotaaluk speak.
mvalpy@globeandmail.ca