In the Catholic Church, US bishops have been in a froth over health care funding for contraception – even though the overwhelming majority of ordinary Catholics have been practising birth control for decades. In the UK and Australia as well as the US, Catholic bishops are mobilizing against marriage equality – even though most Catholics support it. Just a handful of Catholic bishops are grudgingly acknowledging that there could be value in alternative legal recognition for same –  sex partnerships, while most Catholics just do not see these relationships as even a matter of morality at all.

In the Anglican / Episcopal church, where governance is more democratic and leadership is more in touch with their members, things are different. The English church has a formal working group engaged in studying the issues around human sexuality, which has just announced the appointment of expert advisers to assist its work, and the US Episcopal Church is even further ahead. There, says the presiding bishop, “it’s a done deal”

NEW YORK — The movement toward legalizing same-sex marriage and the acceptance of gay people as clergy and lay members of religious groups is “a done deal” that represents “phenomenal” progress, the top figure in the Episcopal Church told The Huffington Post during a recent visit to its newsroom.

In an hour-long conversation with HuffPost staffers, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, touched upon subjects that ranged from her views on how to interpret scripture and challenges that face the church as its demographics change to debates over contraception and the relationship between religion and science. Read more of this post