Five days working busily behind closed doors. The primates of the 38 Anglican Provinces convened to Canterbury by archbishop Justin Welby eventually decided to “suspend” for three years the US Episcopal Church (Tec), the stars-and-stripes branch of the Anglican Church, which ordained its first openly gay bishop, Gene Robison, in 2003. This has been announced in a final release, which was issued last night, before today’s press conference. The document had leaked, so the primates decided to publish it in full, to avoid “speculation”. “The recent developments in the Episcopal Church in changing their marriage canons – the Anglican primates write – is a fundamental departure from the faith and lesson followed by the majority of our Provinces about the doctrine of marriage”. The primates insist that, in the light of the lesson of the Scriptures, the Church “supports marriage as a lifelong faithful union between a man and a woman”. And they add: deliberately breaking with such lesson is regarded by “many of us” as “departing from the mutual responsibility and implicit interdependence” which exists in the Anglican Communion. Hence the decision to suspend the Episcopal Church for three years. Basically, this means that the US Church can no longer represent the Anglican Communion in ecumenical and interreligious organisations; that its members cannot be appointed or elected in a permanent internal committee, and that, while they attend meetings of the Anglican Communion, they will not take part in the decision-making process. A decision, the latter, that is significant, since the Lambeth Conference will be held in 2018. Finally, the primates decided to set up a workgroup to restore mutual relations and trust between the Churches.