I am interested in hearing from our bloggers in the UK what the developments at the Church of England Synod regarding women bishops will mean for us. The New York Times has posted an article which dredges up the annoying "disaffected Anglicans" terminology in reference to the Holy Father's offer last fall.
LONDON — The Church of England moved another step closer to an unbridgeable schism between traditionalists and reformers on Saturday when its General Synod, or parliament, rejected a bid by the archbishop of Canterbury to strike a compromise over the ordination of women bishops aimed at preserving the increasingly fragile unity of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
-snip-
The narrow rejection of the archbishop’s compromise proposals at the Synod meeting in the northern English city of York appeared to raise the threat of a new wave of defections by traditionalists among the church’s laity and clergy to the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Benedict XVI had responded to the internal divisions among Anglicans last year by offering special provisions for disaffected Anglicans wishing to convert to Catholicism — a move that has led to resentment among some Anglicans.
An earlier wave of defections followed the Church of England’s decision to accept openly gay priests, and moves by the Episcopal Church in the United States to ordain gay bishops.
That led to the offer of special terms for Anglican converts that was made last October by Benedict, and to the shock that was provoked among leading Anglicans, including the archbishop of Canterbury, who saw it as a blow to their efforts to hold Anglicanism together in the face of its deep divisions.
Resentment over the pope’s move has cast a pall over his state visit to Britain in September, which will be the first papal visit to Britain since Pope John Paul II visited in 1982. The archbishop, who has been a major advocate of reconciliation between Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, has signaled his disdain for the pope’s move by making statements that have conveyed a mood of indifference toward the papal visit.
The proposed compromise in York was co-sponsored by the second most senior prelate in the Church of England, John Sentamu, the archbishop of York. The two men had staked their authority and prestige on winning support for their proposals, and their failure left the Church of England — and the wider Anglican Communion, with an estimated 80 million followers worldwide — facing a new low in its long battle to avert a breakup that would create two rival Anglican communions, one traditionalist and the other reformist.
The Church of England Synod has at least 10 more hours of debate over the next three days on the terms under which women will be consecrated as bishops — a step that was formally approved two years ago. Women priests have been ordained in the Church of England since 1994 and now represent nearly a third of the church’s working clergy.
Reformers had argued that the latest compromise would reduce women bishops to “second class” status among bishops and would lead to inevitable conflict.
I'll cross-post a comment I left on the blog of a friend of mine (David Schütz at Sentire cum Ecclesia), who referred to this issue himself – he has a professional interest, since he is a former Lutheran pastor who now works as Ecumenical & Interfaith Officer for the (Catholic) Archdiocese of Melbourne:
I must admit, I agree with those who are adamant that no provision be made – just as, in the Lutheran Church of Sweden, no man can be ordained a pastor if he disagree with the ordination of women. After all, if it is the official doctrine of a denomination that women can be ordained, those who refuse them are cutting themselves off from the communion of that body, disbelieving its tenets and ostentatiously refusing the ministrations of such clergywomen.
The C. of E. was in a period of “reception” of the doctrine that it now holds, according to which women may be ordained, from the time when ordination to the Anglican priesthood was opened to them (and arguably from when the diaconate was opened to them, not just a separate stream for deaconesses) until now, or very soon, when women are made Anglican bishops. That period of reception must now end with the C. of E.’s recognition of women as susceptible of all grades of the threefold ministry, as decided by its Synod (whose decisions are but rubberstamped by Parliament these days: it isn’t 1928 any more).
The Apostolic Succession is at issue: those who hold that women cannot be ordained must realize that, if so, whatever of previous claims to the validity of Anglican Orders, from now on the chain will be more and more broken, and finally severed, once the last male bishop ordained by males themselves male-ordained dies.
After all, how can it make sense to belong to a body, and yet reject as false and invalid the ministry of her bishops on the grounds of their gender? A bishop is the one who rules each diocese; if -as will soon be the case in the C. of E. – the bishop be a woman, and if her ministrations be rejected by a minority while the majority accept her, the only logical recourse for those who refuse her is schism.
While as a Catholic I do not believe women can be ordained, if I were Anglican, I would either have to change that belief in order to remain within that communion in good conscience, or I would have perforce to leave. I cannot see how there can be a middle way.
True, there have been suggestions of continuing with the “flying bishops” who look after those who reject the ministry of women priests, even of establishing a Third Province for such (a fond dream, alas); but how can one speak of the Anglican Communion when the Episcopalians in the U.S. have had female bishops for a good while now, and yet other branches of that Communion do not accept such, nay, do not accept clergywomen at all? It makes no sense.
If I were an Anglican holding firm against W.O., if I went to the U.S. on holiday I would need to check who ordained the clergy whose parishes I went to for divine service – since if any had a woman in their “genealogy” of ordination, I would perforce reject their ministrations as invalid.
Either women cannot be ordained, or they can; and seeing as the validity of the sacraments is of the highest importance, and these sacraments are at the service of communion in the broadest sense, then those who will not accept the sacraments ministered by women cannot remain in communion with those who do.
If Fr Samantha looks after St Boltoph’s-in-the-Mire, I can avoid her by worshipping at St Chad’s-under-the-Bridge; but once she is advanced to be the Bishop of Sillyham, no more trips to the Cathedral of St Ethelbert for Evensong! Furthermore, she from then on is in law my Ordinary, doing all the things bishops do, such as moving clergy about, writing pastorals, going on visitation, confirming children, and ordaining new clergy for the diocese – yet I can see these acts only as a sham!
What will happen to St Chad’s parish? Will Fr Humphrey Stockingham, our very High priest, now pause in the Roman Canon (we’re strictly B.C.P., “except for the Secret and the Canon and the Dominus vobiscum”), since he could hardly say “Benedict our Pope” (we do that at St Chad’s, so as to make a point, not that we’d ever actually swim the Tiber, R.C.’s are such asinine philistines and so mean about divorce, remarriage, and all the rest) “and Samantha our bishop”?
What happens when Fr H. retires (he’s 93 and suffers recurrent bouts of Roman fever), and Bp Samantha exercises her undoubted right of presentment to the benefice: for it is odds on that our new priest would be a very nice fellow, young Fr Piers de Fry, who happens to be her (suitably ritualistic) nephew, just ordained – by her?
Even if the Archbishops’ scheme had gone through, Anglo-Catholics said it wasn’t enough, and either the continuance of the Flying Bishops or the fabled Third Province was needed. How could it have worked, anyway, for the local Diocesan to delegate her rights to visit, confirm and so forth to a male bishop, just to salve a few consciences? Hardly pleasant for her, and – more importantly – if, as the minority would still insist, she were no real bishop at all, how could she be suffered to act as if she were one, ruling the diocese and so forth?
How could it be tolerated that a small minority continue to insist on male-only ministry, ostentatiously getting their seminarians ordained only by the few remaining bishops who haven’t ordained women? How could their men continue to teach and preach that women cannot be priests let alone bishops, and that the pretended acts of the latter, even more so than those of the former, are valueless and ought not to be recognized?
And here is the response that I posted to Joshua at the "Sentire cum Ecclesia" blog:
I agree with the first paragraph of Joshua’s initial comment, which is true as a metter of both “theologic” and good sense — but the lies, the deceit, the broken promises that the Anglican (anod Lutheran) liberals, revisionists and their “running dogs” have made over the years, in Sweden in the 1950s and in England in the 90s (not to mention in Canada and the States in the 70s) really does impel me to hope that the WOB measure in England falls just short of the required two-thirds majority when it comes up for final passage in the General Synod sometime in 2012. To that end, and writing in a Machiavellian fashion, my hope is that the General Synod will not offer so much as a fragment of a withered fig leaf to the opponents, and thereby make it as difficult and painful as possible for them to assume the “ostrich position” so congenial to so many of them.
I will not discuss the various parallels here, but in Sweden it was no less a person than the Minister of Religious Affairs himself that enunciated a “conscience clause” in 1958 — and down to the very late 1970s it was fairly generally adhered to, with the exception that the government went out of its way to try to block the selection of opponents of WO as bishops (in Sweden each diocese generated a list of three names of which ther gov’t had to choose one) by passing over opponents who made it onto the final list (in two cases, Visby in 1962 and Gothenburg in 1970, where all three men on the list were opposed, the gov’t chose the one they thought would be “weakest” in his opposition, in the latter case miscalculating spectacularly by choosing Bertil Gartner [1924-2009], the youngest candidate, who opposed itn spiritedly until his retirement in 1991). Then, in the late 70s, various Swedish Lutheran bishops began to balk at conducting separate ordination services for men opposed to WO (this was a big deal for them, because at the close of ordination services in all the Scandinavian Lutheran churches, those who have been rdained all shake hands with one another, “giving the right hand of fellowship” and thereby recognizing their common bond as pastors), which created a crisis. Very early in the 80s some interesting talks were held about how both sides couls coexist in the future, and the “liberals” were willing to be rather generous — but they expected opponents to admit that their basic problem with WO was “psychological” (ideas about women’s roles and adhesion to “St. Paul’s ideas” in that sphere) rather than strictly theological. But when the conservatives said plainly that they denied the validity of the ordination of women, and therefore insisted that it was a matter of theological truth and Scriptural prescriptions, the talks broke down in acrimony, and in 1982 the “conscience clause” was formally rescinded by the Swedish Church Assembly — although it was not until 1994 that that assembly passed measures prohibiting the ordination as pastors of men opposed to WO (only in 2000 was this extended to deacons, an “order” which had been revived in the Swedish Church in 1942) and their selection as bishops — and, ironically, it is only since the disestablishment of the Swedish Church in 2000 that these strictures have been relentlessly enforced.
One might write parallel accounts of what has happened along those lines in the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church, or in the Church of Norway and the Church of Finland (in which latter body, which has just elected its first “woman bishop,” the process only got under weigh with the retirement of the last bishop opposed to WO in 2002; see the “dormant” blog:
http://tentatioborealis.blogspot.com/ )
but to what point? Nevertheless, I am “conflicted” between the desire to see the liberals frustrated, baffled and enraged by encountering defeat “at the final post,” and the knowledge (a) that they will keep coming back, like a bad odour or a metastatized cancer, until they get their way, and (b) that such “pointless victories” for the conservatives will confirm too many of them in their belief that there really is some worthwhile “Catholic essence” to contend for in their “merely Protestant” denominations.