Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Guardian fumes over concessions on "female bishops"

The Church of England's House of Bishops – for which, read the archbishops of Canterbury and York – has explained how they hope to mollify the opponents of female clergy. The proposals are breathtaking.

The archbishops envisage that the Church of England, once it has female bishops, will continue ordaining men who do not accept these women, finding them jobs they will deign to accept, and promoting some of them to be bishops who will work to ensure the continued supply of male priests who refuse to accept female clergy. In fact, the church will pay three bishops (the formerly "flying" sees of Ebbsfleet, Richborough, and Beverley) to work full time against their female colleagues, and to nourish the resistance.

The General Synod, last summer, rejected the archbishops' plan to fix a reservation in law where the opponents could live as if nothing had changed. Now they have brought back the same proposals, but call them "a code of practice" instead. In theory, this gives both sides what they want. In reality neither will find it easy to accept.

Obviously this will be unacceptable to most supporters of women's ordination. But the cream of the joke is that it will probably be unacceptable to their principled opponents as well. The unscrupulous ones will, of course, be very happy with the deal.

Despite all these concessions, there will be female bishops, as there are already female priests, and these will be treated exactly the same as male ones – except by the men who don't want to treat them equally and who believe that God has called them to undermine women's authority wherever it appears.

This is apparently Rowan Williams's idea of justice.
Read the rest here.

4 comments:

Alice C. Linsley said...

Journalists just don't get Recieved Tradition.

The comments are so revealing. The British are thoroughly unchurched and the Church of England must carry a large part of the blame for that.

Matthew M said...

The CofE is dying and female Bishops will kill it off. Female 'priests' haven't stalled the clergy shortage, parishes without clergy continue to close at alarm rates and the female priests don't want to get their hands dirty in small parishes. They want the BIG ones where the action is. It's not about 'Religion or fait'h, it's about 'politics and power'.

A sad joke.

Visibilium said...

It's a wonderful development. I expect to receive many hours of merriment from the Schori-wannabees' bleating.

Igumen Gregory said...

It reminds me of statement made by a friend of mine who claimed that Rowan is like a juggler trying to keep 5 balls in the air, 2 of which are....