Really, you couldn’t make it up. The Church of England, because of its arcane and dysfunctional, though supposedly democratic, voting procedures, has yet again decided that someone who really is a priest (that’s what they believe), and is worthy of promotion, is not necessarily eligible to be made into a bishop.
I say nothing about the question of what is known as “the validity of Anglican orders”, except that I can’t see why any Anglican takes offence when we say that by Catholic criteria they are invalid, when it is quite clear that apart from a few Anglo-Catholics, who think they are sacrificing priests in the same sense as Catholic priests do, what the Church of England as a whole thinks a “priest” is and does is utterly different from what the Catholic Church believes about Holy Orders: in other words, we are both using the same word to describe utterly different things.
Nothing, surely, illustrates that better than the debate about “women bishops” which took place yesterday. The discussion wasn’t about the sacrament of holy orders at all: did anyone even mention such a thing, even in passing? It was all about women’s rights. In other words, this was the governing body of a wholly secularised Church talking about a wholly secular issue.
As Jemima Thackray put it in the Telegraph, “as I listened to the debate unfold, hearing progressives pitched against conservatives … I found myself being too often oddly impressed by the cases made by the anti-women bishops lobby, despite the fact that nothing would’ve pleased me more than to see women enter the episcopate. One argument kept ringing true: the claim that the pro-women campaigners were too quick to try and make the church like the world.
“Uncomfortably, I had to agree. Too many of those in favour of women bishops just sounded too… well… worldly. My reasons for thinking this differed wildly from the evangelicals who think that the church needs to be set apart, not conforming to a society which no longer sees man as the head of the woman. My main concern was that some arguments for women bishops just sounded too much like a contrived government initiative to get women into the boardroom.”
Continued: Catholic Herald
Image: The Independent
Dr William Oddie is a leading English Catholic writer and broadcaster. He edited The Catholic Herald from 1998 to 2004 and is the author of The Roman Option and Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy.
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