Peter Carnley Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

From 2004 he served as co-chair of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC II) seeking greater unity between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. He served as distinguished visiting professor in systematic theology at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City from 2010 to 2013.

In 2001, amid questions about the possibility of the church celebrating same-sex marriages, Carnley suggested that the church might be able to bless gay “friendships”. Later, Carnley acknowledged that the consecration of American Bishop Gene Robinson created controversy in the church, but predicted that the church would not be irreparably split over the issue.

Carnley was consecrated a bishop on 26 May 1981 at St George’s Cathedral, Perth and installed there as Archbishop of Perth and Metropolitan of Western Australia in the same service. In the 1980s he supported the ordination of women and, on 7 March 1992, he ordained the first women priests in the Anglican Church of Australia at St George’s Cathedral, Perth. His sermon on the occasion took as its reference an autobiographical piece by Charlotte Perkins Gilman entitled The Yellow Wallpaper. Carnley used Gilman’s account of the self-destruction consequent on a “benignly prescribed, submissive, middle-class role” demanded of women in the 19th century to consider the “implications of the philosophy that women should “stay in their place, maintaining silence, concealing problems and repressing creativity”. The yellow wallpaper of the title is what the imprisoned protagonist in Gilman’s story peels off the walls as she goes mad. Carnley used it as a metaphor for the situation of the women who had been waiting to be allowed to become priests, saying: “Today, we are peeling away the sickly yellow, faded, silverfish-ridden wallpaper with which the church has surrounded itself and imprisoned women for centuries past in its benign and perhaps well-meaning determination to confine them by role.”

Carnley was born in New Lambton, New South Wales. He trained for ordination at St John’s College, Morpeth, and was ordained deacon in 1962 and priest in 1964. He studied in Australia at Trinity College, Melbourne, and in England at Emmanuel College and St John’s College, Cambridge, and became warden of St John’s College at the University of Queensland, as well as lecturer in theology at the University of Queensland, before becoming a bishop. As a lecturer in the 1970s he experimented with Process Theology. He holds many honorary doctorates and a Lambeth DD (2012) and is an honorary fellow of Trinity College (Melbourne), Emmanuel College (Cambridge) and St John’s College (Cambridge).

Peter Frederick Carnley AC (born 17 October 1937) is a retired Australian Anglican bishop and author. He was the Archbishop of Perth from 1981 to 2005 and Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia from 2000 until May 2005. He ordained the first women priests in Australia. In the 2007 Queen’s Birthday Honours list, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia. He is married to Ann Carnley.He also founded the school Peter Carnley Anglican Community School.