He wasn't even from New Jersey.

The cleric, dressed in white and gold vestments, who celebrated the sacrament of confirmation before about 325 people, was a conservative churchman from South Carolina who had arrived in Hackensack just hours before the ceremony.

Despite efforts of conservatives in the worldwide Anglican hierarchy to maintain a strictly biblical line, the Western Church is heading inexorably down the liberal road.

Bishops are turning a blind eye to gay ceremonies, many in church, which mirror blessing services offered already each year to thousands of divorcees who have civil weddings.

The warning, in a long interview in La Repubblica, Italy's Left-leaning newspaper, comes as the Bavarian-born cardinal, who is the Pope's doctrinal chief, is being viewed as an important late entry for the papacy.

Coming shortly after MEPs refused to approve the Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione as European justice commissioner because of his strong Catholic views on gays and women, his statements may be seen by some as something of a manifesto.

This statement is of course deeply undercut by the very shape of the Report’s theological premises, which the bishop knows so well: the character of God’s own life as Trinity, the mission of God within the world, the Church’s life as a reflection and instrument of that mission, its demanded life in unity and radical holiness, its subjection, especially through its bishops, to Scripture’s dynamic call and shaping in the life of the Church as a whole, and the ordering of common life in a way t