Thank God for Female Bishops

[cbayer]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/thank-god-female-bishops

DECEMBER 2, 2014

BY JANE KRAMER


Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, stands with women priests on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, in London.
CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/GETTY

If you’re a believer, thank God. If you’re not, thank Her anyway, because it’s now official that Henry VIII’s Church of England will be getting its first female bishop. The news came after an overwhelming show of hands at the church’s General Synod, in November, and provided the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal month for women’s rights—a month in which American feminists, still reeling from the strong likelihood of a fresh assault on Roe v. Wade, in January, when the Senate changes hands, read about revelations involving a noxious culture of campus rapes, including an alleged fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, that for years had gone unpunished by college administrators and were never reported to the police. (And let’s not forget the feminists in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took the podium at a women’s conference last week to declare that “women are not equal to men” and that to pretend otherwise was “against nature.”)

Americans, of course, are used to the presence of female bishops. Women in the Episcopal priesthood—the Episcopal Church being Anglicanism’s American branch—won their fight for elevation in 1989, five years before English women were even admitted to the priesthood. Since then, some twenty American women have been elected to the episcopate. One of them—Katharine Jefferts Schori—has been the Presiding Bishop (or Primate) for nearly nine years. But the vote in England may be a lot more significant than it first appears. England’s church is an “established” church, a church of state—its clergy are accountable to the state. Twenty-six of its bishops sit in the House of Lords. Its historic assets, now supplemented by diocesan assessments and pension contributions, are overseen by thirty-three commissioners, among them six ministers of state, including (ex officio) the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor, and five members nominated or appointed directly by the present Queen.

Because of this, and quite apart from the many sound theological arguments in favor of female bishops—among them, that there is nothing in the Gospels that precludes women from apostolic service; the concept of an all-male apostolic succession comes not from Jesus but from Paul, who converted years after the death of Christ—there is now a legal imperative to ordain female bishops. In 2010, Parliament passed a blanket Equality Act, which meant that the Church of England was no longer automatically protected by a religious exemption when it came to women at any level of the clergy. (Neither, if you follow the letter of the law, were Britain’s Roman Catholics.) That act was symbolically reinforced last year, three months before the birth of Prince George, by a further act of Parliament that guaranteed the right of royal succession to the eldest child of a reigning monarch or heir to the throne, regardless of the child’s sex. In England, this amounted to historic news—call it the crown jewel of an equal-rights revision. And bear in mind that there is still no American equal-rights amendment, let alone revision—no constitutional umbrella over our scattershot anti-discrimination laws, with their disclaimers and their creaky procedures for compliance. The last attempt to achieve a state-by-state plurality for an amendment lasted ten years, and expired in 1982.

But most impressive, perhaps, was the example set by the Church of England—mother church to Anglican community of about eighty million people, the third largest Christian community in the world—in making a clear and simple moral statement: this is who we, as Christians of the social gospel, are now. About twenty-seven million people belong to the C of E, according to its baptismal records. That’s not a lot. Taken together, there are as many Anglicans in Nigeria and Uganda as there are in England, and if you add the rest of Africa, millions more. The church in southern Africa remains progressive—thanks in large part to the benign but fiercely egalitarian example of Desmond Tutu, the retired South African archbishop—but for years the Anglicans of Nigeria and Uganda have been under the thumb of reactionary archbishops, and their churches were already in open schism with the Church of England. Africa isn’t alone in this. In 2008, two hundred bishops from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, along with a handful of disgruntled “traditionalists” (their term) from England, America, and Australia, boycotted the last decennial conference of Anglican bishops, a gathering of the apostolic tribe convened each decade by the Archbishop of Canterbury, their spiritual leader but, as it happens, a leader with no disciplinary authority beyond his own Canterbury diocese and with little theological authority beyond his own influence as England’s Primate. Their absence wasn’t surprising, given that those dissenting bishops had already held their own conference less than a month earlier, in Jerusalem, where they formed a kind of counter-Anglican Communion, producing a statement to the effect that they no longer recognized the legitimacy of Canterbury and the Church of England. Their issues were female bishops (heretical) and gay priests (unnatural) and same-sex marriage (worse).

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[trotsky]

1. Yay god!

Uh, how long did it take again?

[AtheistCrusader]

2. Omnipotence doesn't seem all it's cracked up to be.

[hrmjustin]

3. So glad the mother church made the right call.

Here in the Good old USA we made this decision in mid 70's.

[cbayer]

4. Better late than never. That looks like one delighted group of women.