At a conference in London, Archbishop Tutu said he sometimes felt ashamed of his fellow Anglicans as they focused obsessively on trying to resolve their disagreement about homosexuality while 30,000 people died each day because of poverty.

"We really will not be able to win wars against so-called terror as long as there are conditions that make people desperate, and poverty, disease and ignorance are amongst the chief culprits," he said.

"We seem to be engaging in this kind of, almost, past-time [while] there's poverty, hunger, disease, corruption.

"I must imagine that God is weeping, and the world quite rightly should dismiss the Church in those cases as being totally irrelevant."

Archbishop Tutu accused some of his fellow Anglicans of going against the teaching of Jesus in their treatment of homosexual people by "persecuting the already persecuted".

The South African Nobel peace laureate said traditionalists were wrong to suggest that gay people had chosen homosexuality and the dispute had to be kept in proportion.

"It will be good for us obviously, to resolve our differences on this, and maybe accept that we agree to differ," he said.

Last update: 01-29-2009 17:30