The future of the Church of England?
Jane Kramer's article in The New Yorker on the battle in the Church of England over whether to allow women to be bishops is now available online in full:
A Canterbury Tale
The battle within the Church of England to allow women to be bishops.
by Jane Kramer in the New Yorker
Remember the Church of England, that mythically placid community of Sunday Christians and beaming vicars whom you met in Austen and possibly came to loathe in Trollope? “The Tory Party at prayer,” generations of Fleet Street leader writers called it. You can forget that now. The vicar you meet today is likely to be a young woman with a couple of Oxbridge degrees, and the country’s favorite cleric is Geraldine Granger, a plump chocoholic sitcom priest known to people who watch the BBC as the Vicar of Dibley. Geraldine, played by the actress Dawn French, made her début in 1994, the year that women were first ordained as priests of the Church of England. She stayed near the top of the sitcom ratings for the better part of thirteen years, which is three years longer than Tony Blair ran Britain, and continues to shepherd her parishioners through DVDs and reruns—during which time more than twenty-five hundred women have been ordained. By now, women account for nearly a third of the Church of England’s working priests, and most of them are waiting for the investiture of the Church of England’s first female bishop—a process begun in 2008, when the laity, clergy, and bishops in the Church’s governing body, the General Synod, voted in favor of removing the last vestiges of gender discrimination from canon lawOur earlier report is here.
Poor Church of England
By Mark Silk at Spiritual-Politics
If you think the pope's got problems, consider the Archbishop of Canterbury. As pictured by Jane Kramer in the current New Yorker, Rowan Williams is a very smart, eirenic soul with a job that only a Machiavelli would have a chance of carrying off.. . .
"We mean to hold our own," Churchill told the House of Commons after British troops turned back Rommel at the battle of El Alamein. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." In due course, of course, that's just what Churchill presided over. Even if Rowan Williams manages to eke out a victory, any victory, it's increasingly evident that he's become the ABC in order to preside over the liquidation of the Anglican Communion--and perhaps the C of E itself.
It may be that I am missing Kramer, and Silk, but they both write as if the CoE has is made up entirely of the Evangelical wing and the Anglo-Catholic wing, and that there is no middle. How, then, could the CoE General Synod be moving steadfastly, if laboriously, towards dropping the requirement that bishops be males?
Posted by John B. Chilton![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 22, 2010 12:16 PM
From Kramer:
“How do you eat an elephant?” he said, with something between a chuckle and a sigh, when I asked how he hoped to hold his church together, given that the demands of Anglican women were so completely at odds with the demands of Anglican men whose own inclusion specifically involved excluding those women from episcopal service. “I suppose it’s by using as best I can the existing consultative mechanisms to create a climate—and I think that’s often the best, to create a climate,” he told me. “There’s a phrase which has struck me very much: that you can actually ruin a good cause by pushing it at the wrong moment and not allowing the process of discernment and consent to go on, and that’s part of my view.” He thought that with time, patience, and enough discussion within the Church you could temper the opposition to female bishops—despite the fact that three synods since 1994 have tried to address the issue, and the opposition remains intractable.
Let's call The Letter from Lambeth Palace: “There’s a phrase which has struck me very much: that you can actually ruin a good cause by pushing it at the wrong moment and not allowing the process of discernment and consent to go on, and that’s part of my view.”
As opposed to The Letter from a Birmingham Jail: "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied.""
http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html
Posted by John B. Chilton![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 22, 2010 12:24 PM
In response to John Chilton, I say sometimes it's one, sometimes it's the other. I don't know whether Rowan or Martin is the right one to listen to in the present circumstances in England. It's already long established that women can be Anglican bishops, and thank God the first woman diocesan was not an American. That women for the moment can't be bishops in England diminishes the Church of England. I'm not sure what if anything it does to the rest of us.
Posted by William R. MacKaye![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/nav-commenters.gif)
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April 23, 2010 12:45 AM