VANCOUVER, B.C.—Orthodox Anglicans say they feel vindicated that the Anglican Church of Canada has been asked to voluntarily withdraw from a key governing body for three years because of its acceptance of a blessing for same-sex unions.

“This is a very significant step. It actually removes them from the corridors of power and influence, and that’s never happened previously,” Ed Hird, rector of St. Simon’s Church in North Vancouver, told CBC British Columbia.

Meeting in Northern Ireland, the Anglican Communion’s 38 primates or senior leaders—including Canada’s Archbishop Andrew Hutchinson—agreed that the Anglican Church of Canada should remove itself for the time being from the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC).

The same request was made of the Episcopal Church in the United States (ECUSA), because it had elected an openly gay bishop.

The consultative council comprises elected laity, clergy and bishops. It offers guidance on policy issues to the member provinces of the Anglican Communion.

The suspensions would last until the next all-bishops conference at Lambeth in 2008. The one exception would be a hearing in June to explain their pro-gay actions.

“[The primates are] saying, in effect, that [New Westminster bishop] Michael Ingham and his folks are out of line, what they are doing is not Anglican, it’s not consistent with either faith or practice,” said Hird.

It was Ingham’s decision in 2003 to allow same-sex blessings within his diocese that triggered the current crisis.

Yet Hutchinson says he “passionately” opposed the Primates’ proposal, and only decided for the sake of unity to accept it. “We were trying to reconcile the irreconcilables,” he told the Anglican Journal.

But Ingham is not impressed. In a statement, he denounced as “invidious and unsatisfactory” that the Canadian and American churches should have to explain “why homosexual Christians should receive equal treatment in the church.”

Hutchinson told the Globe and Mail that he too felt “very sorry” for the ongoing discrimination being shown toward gays and lesbians at the highest levels of Anglicanism. But he defended the agreement as “part of a pain that needs to be endured” in order to avert schism.

And while the primates may have succeeded in keeping the Anglican Communion united in the short term, its long-term prospects remain very much in doubt.

Its survival, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, told The Times, “will require people to say, somewhere along the line, that they were wrong.”

Whether or not the Canadian church should accept the proposal and withdraw from the ACC will be discussed at the Council of General Synod when it meets in early May. And at this point, neither side seems prepares to budge.

Anglican Essentials Canada said in a news release that only repentance will bring the Anglican Church of Canada back into full communion. “The failure to do so implies the choice to walk alone,” it warned.

Ingham, on the other hand, dismisses the voluntary suspension as nothing more than a bid “to appease the angriest voices in the Communion [that] should be firmly resisted by both churches.”