Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

I don't get it

Why allow a woman to be a priest (as opposed to a priestess), but not allow her to ascend to bishop? Obviously it came down to a vote, and there are a lot of areas of where the Church of England has domain that isn't as (in my opinion) as forward thinking as others, but I want to know the religious justification. I understand the case in the Catholic church, where Apostolic succession and Judaeo-Christian ideas of ritual purity of women surface, but I don't get this. But then I'm Pagan, not Anglican.

The Church of England Votes Against Women Bishops

This lends some clues:
Meanwhile, others believe allowing women bishops is not only the right thing to do, but also the necessary thing to do to keep pace with modern England. The Church has been bleeding members for a number of years, with reports from the Research and Statistics Department of the Archbishops’ Council for 2010 showing that less than 2% of Britons attend regular services. And the Church’s latest move isn’t likely to register well with the average citizen; a July poll showed that 74% of Brits thought the Church of England should allow women bishops. “Theology doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” Jan McFarlane, the Archdeacon of Norwich, pointed out during her speech to the Synod on Tuesday. “A church so out of step with the world around us becomes an irrelevance.”

Incidentally, even some advocates of women bishops weren’t fully supportive of Tuesday’s measure anyway, as it included a clause allowing individual traditionalist parishes to opt for a stand-in male bishop to oversee a women bishop. The clause was an attempt to placate inflexible opponents of women bishops, but it obviously wasn’t enough to win over everyone. After the measure was rejected on Tuesday, Archbishop Williams expressed his sadness over the decision and added that “this vote of course isn’t the end of the story. This is not an issue that is going to go away.” Which, unfortunately, was the one conclusion that the entire Church of England was hoping for.
That provision for opting for a man just was stupid, in my opinion. Either allow women or not. But it just seems inconsistent to allow one to be a priest but not allow her to rise up in the hierarchy of the church. If it were a business, rather than the state church, it would be considered discrimination. Um...I think it still counts as that, regardless of the organisation's position.

No comments: