Shocker to the Anglicans!
Church of England barely rejects
appointing female bishops
Bishops and clergy voted for it overwhelmingly but
lay faithful vote fell 6 short of required majority -
Issue may remain open till next Synod in 2019
By JOHN F. BURNS
November 20, 2012
LONDON — A Church of England synod on Tuesday voted against the appointment of women as bishops, rejecting a change that has been debated intensely and often bitterly for the past decade.
More than 70 percent of the 446 synod votes were in favor of opening the church’s episcopacy to women. But the synod’s voting procedures require two-thirds majorities in each of its three “houses”: bishops, clergy and laity. Although the bishops and clergy met that test, the vote of lay members was a wafer-thin six short of a two-thirds majority.
Since the English church split with Rome under Henry VIII nearly 500 years ago, only men have served as bishops, and the outcome of the two-day synod was seen by both sides as a watershed in the wider struggle over the Church of England’s future.
It pitted reformers eager to open the way for women as bishops against traditionalists, including evangelicals and so-called Anglo-Catholics, who argued that the teachings of Jesus, and the fact that the Twelve Apostles were all men, provided no biblical basis for women serving in the church’s top hierarchy.
A typical outburst against the synod vote came from a church member, David Sims, who sent an e-mail to a live blog on the BBC Web site. “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he wrote.
In the closing passage of the synod debate, a leading minister of the Church of England, Canon Rosie Harper, said a “no” vote would be a death knell for a church that surveys have shown as drawing fewer regular worshipers than Britain’s mosques. “It will inevitably be seen as the act of a dying church, more wedded to the past than committed to hope for the future,” she said.
The vote seemed certain to sharpen divisions within the English church, the historic homeland of Anglicanism.
Twenty years after the church approved the ordination of female priests, which took decades, a third of its clergy members are women, many holding senior positions like canons and archdeacons. Their expectation had been that they would begin to win appointments as bishops by 2014 if the change had been approved.
It also seemed to leave the English church with little prospect of finding common ground on other deeply divisive issues, particularly the push by some for approval of same-sex marriages. The government of Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, has said it will pass legislation approving such marriages within the next year, but powerful figures in the Church of England have vowed to shut church doors against same-sex nuptials taking place or being blessed in the churches.
Perhaps more troubling for the Anglican Communion and its 80 million followers around the world, it promised to deepen the rift on issues of gender and sexuality between liberals who predominate in the Episcopal Church in the United States and more conservative elements in the Anglican fold elsewhere in the world, including a small but powerful minority in England and a vociferous traditionalist bloc, particularly in Africa.
Women have served as bishops in the Episcopal Church for years, and a wider divergence of views on issues of gay bishops, same-sex marriages and other matters of gender and sexuality have left Anglicans and liberal Episcopalians struggling to prevent a schism that could see the church splintering into doctrinal and regional fiefs.
The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, who will retire next month, has spent much of his 10 years as the senior bishop of the Church of England and symbolic head of the Anglican Communion devising complex compromises intended to prevent a schism, but has acknowledged failing to accomplish a lasting reconciliation.
The bishops in the synod, including Archbishop Williams and his recently appointed successor, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, both supporters of women as bishops, announced that they would meet in emergency session on Wednesday to review the situation arising from the vote.
The vote appeared to require reformers to begin the debate within the church all over again, with procedures that, if unamended, could delay another vote until 2019.
The reaction among reformers was vociferous, and often angry, with some talking of breaking with the church. Many traditionalists had made similar threats if they were outvoted, some saying that they would consider quitting the Anglican fold and along with other Anglo-Catholics, join the Roman Catholic Church, which has adopted measures to encourage a shift of allegiance, including provisions that allow married Anglican ministers to serve as Catholic priests.
In the end, Tuesday’s vote turned on the two-thirds majority requirement for each house of the synod. The bishops approved the change by 44 to 3, and the clergy by 148 to 45. The vote among the laity, though, was 132 to 74, six votes less than the two-thirds needed.
Resistance among lay voters followed years of efforts to finesse the differences over the issue. With the synod only weeks away, traditionalists were offered a strengthened version of a compromise that would have allowed church parishes opposed to women as bishops to have their affairs overseen by men acting as “stand-in bishops,” who would have been be selected in a manner that respected the parish’s convictions — a formulation aimed at ensuring that the stand-in bishops would oppose the appointment of women as bishops.
Some reformers, particularly women, said that arrangement would relegate female bishops to “second-class” status, and said they would vote against having women as bishops rather than accept what they viewed as a humiliating concession. Some of the more orthodox conservatives also dug in, refusing to accept any compromise that they said conflicted with Jesus’ teachings.
Bishop Welby, a former oil company executive who has risen rapidly through church ranks to his current position as Bishop of Durham, used his address to the synod to press the pragmatic message many expect to be a theme of his time as archbishop, a post he will formally assume in March.
By voting for women as bishops, he said, the Church could show that it could manage “diversity of view without division — diversity in amity, not diversity in enmity.” It was, he said, “time to finish the job” of opening the rank of bishop to women and to move on to many other matters that require the church’s attention.
And here is a very informed Catholic commentary on the above...
Anglican opponents of women bishops
have only put off the evil day
The arguments for women priests were wholly secular. This is,
in any case, the state Church: and in the end the state will decide
By William Oddie
Wednesday, 21 November 2012
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 priests offering a sacrifice 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.”
Nor, however, do I have any sympathy with those who voted against the proposed legislation because they were dissatisfied with the measures proposed to allow them to opt out of having the governance of a woman bishop over their own parish.
As I argued here the last time the question came up in the Synod,
simply by remaining in the Church of England, you have accepted that you are a member of a Church which has women priests: you accept, in other words, that women may be priests, that those women already ordained as such by the Church of England are validly ordained: so what are you on about?
“If a woman is a priest,” as I argued last time, “then she is eligible to be a bishop. If she’s not, she isn’t. Either way, you are a member of a Church in which there are now hundreds of women priests: and whether you put yourself in a ghetto which doesn’t accept them or not, you are still in full communion with them (and don’t give me that stuff about “impaired communion”: you are in full communion with your own bishops (flying or not), who are themselves in full communion with the male bishops who ordained all these women, so you are in full communion with them: get used to it, or leave.
Expecting special arrangements … that will allow you to imagine yourself on to some kind of fantasy island untroubled by women bishops as well as women priests is ludicrous.”
What has all this to do with us? Well, the Church of England is established by law under the Crown; it is the state Church, so we too have a stake in it. Ultimately its affairs are regulated by Parliament: if, that is to say, the Synod had legislated to establish a female episcopate yesterday, its legislation would have had to be taken across the road and translated into English secular law by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Then the Queen would have given her assent.
But in the process of becoming the law of the land, any special arrangements for dissident parishes might well have been removed: last time, members of the 30-strong parliamentary committee of MPs and peers known as the “ecclesiastical committee” (who would in effect have framed the legislation) were saying firmly that any special arrangements for dissident parishes would not be accepted by them.
So what will Parliament do now? I repeat, this is the state Church, and Parliament has the legal right to act. Chris Bryant, the Labour MP and a former Anglican priest, said before the vote that a rejection would “undoubtedly undermine” support for aspects of establishment, including bishops in the Lords.
Frank Field, who sits on the parliamentary ecclesiastical committee, said that in the event of a no vote, he would table a motion to remove the Church’s special exemptions from equality laws. “It would mean that they couldn’t continue to discriminate against women,” he said.
After the vote Ben Bradshaw, the former Labour minister, said: “This means the Church is being held hostage by an unholy and unrepresentative alliance of conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics. This will add to clamour for disestablishment – there is even talk of moves in Parliament to remove the Church’s exemption from the Equality Act.”
That is an idea, it seems, gaining traction: if it happened, it would open the way for women to bring a legal challenge: and if successful, that could lead to women becoming bishops without any safeguards for traditionalists at all.
If those opposed are evangelicals, they have probably already opted out of their dioceses anyway. Evangelicals have little theology of the Church, and are essentially Congregationalists. So they’ll be OK, probably.
As for Anglo-Catholics, there is a place prepared for them: it’s now time to come home. The Church of England is no longer (if ever it was) any place for those of Catholic mind and heart.
But consider the draconian statement formally released by the outgoing Archibshop of Canterbury on yesterday's vote... What 'credibility' is he referring to anyway - his Church's 'credibility' with the secular world whose values it has long adopted? Or credibility with the traditional faithful of his Church?
Rowan Williams says Church of England
'lost credibility' with yesterday's vote
Nov. 21, 2012
By voting against the ordination of women bishops, the Church of England has lost its credibility. This is according to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who accuses members of the Synod of being “wilfully blind” to priorities of wider society.
Williams and his successor, the current Bishop of Durham, Justin Welby, who will take over as leader of the Church of England in December, were both in favour of the reform, twenty years on from the introduction of women priests. But the Synod narrowly rejected the motion yesterday, widening internal divisions between conservatives and liberals.
"Whatever the motivations for voting yesterday … the fact remains that a great deal of this discussion is not intelligible to our wider society. Worse than that, it seems as if we are wilfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of that wider society,” Williams lamented. “We have a lot of explaining to do… the church has "undoubtedly" lost credibility due to the move,” he said.
British Prime Minister David Cameron also expressed his regret about the decision, saying he is a big supporter of the ordination of women bishops and said he was “very sad” about the outcome of the vote.
“I’m particularly sad for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, because I know he saw this as the major campaign he wanted to achieve at the end of his excellent tenure of that office,” Cameron explained. A step the Church of England should have taken in order to be “a modern church, in touch with society.”
And from the site of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a maudling meesage to women Anglicans...
Archbishop tells women
“this is still your Church”
Wednesday 21st November 2012
The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams spoke last night of his “deep personal sadness” that General Synod voted against women bishops.
Archbishop Rowan said the result was “a missed opportunity” for women in the Church and those who have long championed their ministry, calling it “a great grief and great burden”.
Dr Williams said the Church’s commitment to protecting minorities means that “we are, in a sense, caught by our own good practice”.
But he added that the vote was “not the end of the issue”, because around three-quarters of General Synod members supported the inclusion of women in the episcopacy.
“Nobody wants to go on talking about it forever. There is still a will to make this happen. Even those who were opposing this afternoon said: we don’t want to drag this out forever, but we just cannot live with this.”
The Archbishop said the three-to-four years it would take for revised legislation to reach Synod again was the “most sobering and saddening” thing about the result.
“It commits us to a long process of focusing on this question when so many people would like to be talking about something else and doing something else.”
However, Archbishop Rowan said he did not accept that the Church of England is “out of touch with how people are feeling around the country.”
“On the contrary, if you listened to the debate this afternoon, you would have heard people saying, again and again, that we as a Church need to affirm our understanding of how the society around us sees these questions – and also the urgency of it.”
When asked what he would say to women in the Church following the result, the Archbishop said: “I can well understand that feeling of rejection and unhappiness and deep disillusion with the institution of the Church.
"But I would also say: it is still your Church. Not mine, not Synod’s, but yours. Your voice matters and will be heard. It’s important not to give up.”
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 21/11/2012 18:25]