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'Thugs' barricade Zim cathedral
04/02/2008 10:44 - (SA)
Harare - Anglican church authorities were forced on Sunday to hold the enthronement of a new bishop of Harare in a makeshift church after his controversial predecessor used "thugs" to barricade the cathedral, where the ceremony was supposed to be held.
Bishop Sebastian Bakare was stripped of his bishopric for attempting to secede from the synod in protest against homosexuality within the church, and set up his own church, seizing the cathedral and all its property.
Bakare was appointed by the Synod of the Province of Central Africa, the church's highest authority in the region, after Nolbert Kunonga - a staunch supporter of President Robert Mugabe.
'We didn't want to have a fight'
The investiture of Bakare had to be held in a sports stadium in the city, about two kilometres away from the Cathedral of St Mary and All Saints.
"We were holding a communion service before the investiture and we were supposed to have gone to the cathedral, but it became apparent that we wouldn't be able to get in," said Father Michael Chingore, the registrar of the diocese of Harare.
"We were told there were thugs. It was barricaded. The doors were locked. We didn't want to have a fight, so we stayed at the sports centre."
The Anglican church in Zimbabwe, which had the second largest following of any formal Christian church in Zimbabwe, after the Catholic church, had been bitterly divided since Kunonga was elected in 2001, amid accusations of vote rigging and intimidation of the clergy voting for the new bishop.
He immediately aligned himself with Mugabe and his ruling Zanu-PF party, hacking from the walls of the cathedral memorials to the fallen of the two World Wars, because they were white colonial relics, endorsed Mugabe's violent seizure of white-owned farms that began in 2000 and was himself given one, evicting the black peasants who settled there before him.
Senior bishops 'in favour of homosexuality'
He was accused of corruptly grabbing church property for himself and installing pro-ruling party priests to senior positions and banishing priests critical of him to remote parishes.
In 2004 he was accused in a rare trial presided over by the bishops of the synod of urging members of the notorious ruling party militia of guerrilla war veterans to kill an opposition party supporter, but the tribunal was indefinitely postponed.
He announced in December last year that he was leading the Harare diocese out of the synod, claiming that senior bishops of the synod were in favour of homosexuality echoing Mugabe's remarks about gays, that they were "worse than dogs and pigs".
The synod responded by stripping him of his bishopric and his clergyman's licence, but Kunonga laid claim to the cathedral and ignored the synod's appointment of Bishop Bakare as his replacement.
In what observers said was an indication of his considerable political influence, Kunonga got police to ban forcibly Bakare and his congregation from gathering in the cathedral.
Sapa-dpa
- SAPA
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Zimbabwe Special Report
