Barely had the votes of the General Synod been counted when senior clergymen (and they were, indeed, men rather than women of the cloth) began to complain that the church was, in the words of one traditionalist, “mean-spirited and shortsighted” in rejecting the idea of so-called superbishops to oversee those parishes opposed to female bishops.
There was talk – increasingly common in the worldwide Anglican Communion – of schism, of rebel clerics abandoning their ministry within the Church of England to march toward the Church of Rome, reversing the historic split within Christendom inspired by Henry VIII in the 16th century.
For centuries, the break with Rome molded the identity of many English worshipers, and yielded a central element of the Anglican self-perception as tolerant, pragmatic and, most of all, independent. Now, for some, the Vatican itself – profoundly opposed to female clergy – offers a beacon of faith.
The Anglican Communion claims a global membership of almost 80 million, an increasingly fractious body riven by debates between reformers and traditionalists, pulled this way and that by the liberalism of the Episcopal Church in the United States and by the conservatism of many African church leaders.
But the debate about the appointment of female bishops in the Church of England – the historical wellspring of the communion – seemed curiously at odds with the practices that have become normal in many ordinary parishes, where the place of women in the church is not even an issue except at the level of theological debate.
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A divide widens in the Anglican Church
Barely had the votes of the General Synod been counted when senior clergymen (and they were, indeed, men rather than women of the cloth) began to complain that the church was, in the words of one traditionalist, “mean-spirited and shortsighted” in rejecting the idea of so-called superbishops to oversee those parishes opposed to female bishops.
There was talk – increasingly common in the worldwide Anglican Communion – of schism, of rebel clerics abandoning their ministry within the Church of England to march toward the Church of Rome, reversing the historic split within Christendom inspired by Henry VIII in the 16th century.
For centuries, the break with Rome molded the identity of many English worshipers, and yielded a central element of the Anglican self-perception as tolerant, pragmatic and, most of all, independent. Now, for some, the Vatican itself – profoundly opposed to female clergy – offers a beacon of faith.
The Anglican Communion claims a global membership of almost 80 million, an increasingly fractious body riven by debates between reformers and traditionalists, pulled this way and that by the liberalism of the Episcopal Church in the United States and by the conservatism of many African church leaders.
But the debate about the appointment of female bishops in the Church of England – the historical wellspring of the communion – seemed curiously at odds with the practices that have become normal in many ordinary parishes, where the place of women in the church is not even an issue except at the level of theological debate.
Read it all.