Newry, Northern Ireland ? The rift over homosexuality that threatens to split the 77 million-member Anglican Communion cannot be resolved without someone admitting they’re wrong, the church’s spiritual leader warned Friday — a day after leaders asked the U.S. and Canadian churches to withdraw temporarily from a key council.

The election of a gay bishop in the United States and the blessing of same-sex unions there and in Canada have opened a potentially unbridgeable division between Anglican liberals — many of them in North America — and conservatives, who are strongest in Africa and Asia.

“We still face the possibility of division, of course we do,” Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said after a crisis meeting of 35 leaders of Anglican national churches. “That’s not going to go away. Any lasting solution, I think, will require people to say somewhere along the line, ‘Yes, we were wrong.’

On Thursday, Anglican leaders meeting near Belfast asked the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada to withdraw from the Anglican Consultative Council for three years — a move some fear could be the first step toward a permanent split in the communion.