Women deacons at Bristol after their ordination in 1994
Posted on 11/20/2007 11:33:48 AM PST by NYer
Women deacons at Bristol after their ordination in 1994
When the Rev Dr Jennifer Cooper was ordained at Bristol Cathedral a month ago, it was a moment of uncomplicated joy. "I was overwhelmed to be surrounded by so many people, sharing in this very powerful moment," she says. "I was finally going to fulfil my calling."
On the surface, few ceremonies could offer more hope to a Church of England fighting for survival than an ordination. It is a sign of new life, at a time when Sunday attendance threatens to dip below a million.
And, since the ordination of women was approved exactly 15 years ago tomorrow, their presence is now taken for granted: more than 2,000 out of 9,500 Anglican clergy are women, as are almost half of trainee priests. And yet no issue has divided the Church so violently in recent times as that of women priests.
From the moment it became a reality, after a vote of the General Synod in November 1992, there was talk of schism and threats of an exodus to Rome. "This is the death of the Church," concluded one opponent. "You can no more ordain a woman than a pork pie," suggested another.
Lord Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury during those turbulent years, has strong memories of the era. As leader of the Church, it was his job to steer the debate with as few casualties as possible. But he was also a passionate supporter of women priests.
"It was a most bewildering journey, with vitriol and bitterness as well as joy," he recalls. "As Archbishop of Canterbury, I was expected to be on both sides of the debate, which was of course impossible. I was quite clear that the ordination of women was right."
As the General Synod voted on that grey afternoon in 1992, after five and a half hours of debate, history was made, even though the women won with just two votes to spare.
"There were very strong emotions on both sides," says Christina Rees, a leading member of the Movement for the Ordination of Women Priests. "Euphoria on one side, and inconsolable sadness for those who felt their church had been destroyed."
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tough for the first women priests’ |
Supporters of women priests predicted that the church would be transformed, and pews would overflow. But opponents were distraught. "Swamped by modernism, liberalism and feminism, the Church of England is now nothing more than a rotting carcass," lamented the Rev Francis Bown.
In the following weeks, more than 400 priests left the Church. Many took shelter in Roman Catholicism, where they were joined by high-profile parishioners such as the MPs Ann Widdecombe and John Gummer. Others made use of an opt-out clause which let them exclude the women from their parishes. In a move that is now being challenged, the legislation also barred women from becoming bishops. These are still open wounds.
But the impact of women priests was always going to take a long time to be felt, and only now can we begin to get a true sense of it. Were they the disaster their opponents predicted? Have they undermined 450 years of tradition? Or have they breathed new life into an ailing church? In short, was it worth it?
Despite the meticulous attempts of the first generation not to offend, all the new priests met with some prejudice, which even now they are keen to downplay. Few complained when they were called "witches", or jostled by aggressive members of the congregation, or excluded from meetings with male colleagues, or given the cold shoulder by parishioners who refused to take communion from them.
Instead, they bided their time and were eventually acknowledged as having brought a new humanity to the priesthood.
"I remember speaking to a woman who had had a stillborn baby," says Christina Rees. "Her vicar had suffered a series of late miscarriages. She went to her and just held her. Nothing could have been more comforting at that time. That kind of instinctive compassion is part of what they are bringing."
Among the first to take orders was the Rev Canon Wendy Wilby, who read music at Oxford University and is now Precentor at Bristol Cathedral. "I first felt a calling to the priesthood when I was 13 years old," says Canon Wilby, a mother of two.
"People were horrified even at the suggestion: it seemed impossible. I was 40 when it finally happened, but it was still everything I had hoped for. Undoubtedly, the loneliness can be extreme when you feel everyone is against you. I look at some of the new generation, and think, 'You don't know what it was like at the beginning.' But I haven't regretted a minute of it."
Perhaps the single greatest sign of acceptance was the success of The Vicar of Dibley, the comedy series in which Dawn French's Geraldine Granger ran a country parish. At its peak, it attracted 15 million viewers - an audience the Church could only dream of seeing in the pews.
"She's done a lot for us," says the Rev Canon Christine Froude, 60, who was a bank manager before she joined the priesthood 14 years ago. "It was very tough for the first women priests, who fought the hardest battles. There was always a sense of not wanting to offend anyone. Those were serious times and some women had become a bit battle-weary. It was good for all of us for Dibley to present a face of female ministry that was fun as well as caring."
But what of those who opposed the change, and felt compelled to either leave the Church or opt out of parishes where women were ministers? The two main factions were evangelicals, who were opposed mainly on theological grounds, and Anglo-Catholics, who were concerned over relations with other denominations, including the Roman Catholics, that were - and still are - strongly opposed to female clergy.
There has certainly been a softening in attitude. While many maintain that the Church never had the authority to tamper with the priesthood, nearly all acknowledge that women clergy have made a significant human contribution.
"In many ways, it's been a good thing in pastoral terms," says Charles Moore, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph and a convert to Roman Catholicism. "The people who warned against it were wrong if they thought it would cause trouble in parishes: there are more people ministering to the flocks, and women seem to do this very well.
"But it has undoubtedly proved a significant block to church unity. The great movement to get the churches together has ground to a halt. And unity should be such an overwhelming concern for a Christian." In the staunchly Anglo-Catholic parish of St Peter's, Wapping, Father T?E Jones describes the damage to ecumenical relations as "profound" and points out that hopes of women rescuing the Church of England have proved unfounded.
"Women priests are just like men," he says. "Some are brilliant and some are rubbish. But it was never about pragmatism. It was about whether the Church had the authority to make that decision. It's a bit like Arsenal suddenly deciding that they are no longer going to use the offside rule, regardless of the rest of the league. And this has not done anything to stop the decline in Christian practice: we're in just as much trouble as ever."
According to Dr Cooper, who is a month into her ministry, no group could be expected to halt 50 years of decline. But as both a priest and an academic theologian, she believes it is high time for the Church to move on.
"While women are excluded from being bishops and while there are still men joining the priesthood who are against women priests, that is still hard," she says. "But it is not so hard that it stops me from considering the far more important issues facing the Church and the world, or from feeling an enormous sense of joy at what I am doing. Not for a moment."
Supporters of women priests predicted that the church would be transformed, and pews would overflow. But opponents were distraught. "Swamped by modernism, liberalism and feminism, the Church of England is now nothing more than a rotting carcass," lamented the Rev Francis Bown.
In the following weeks, more than 400 priests left the Church. Many took shelter in Roman Catholicism, where they were joined by high-profile parishioners such as the MPs Ann Widdecombe and John Gummer. Others made use of an opt-out clause which let them exclude the women from their parishes. In a move that is now being challenged, the legislation also barred women from becoming bishops. These are still open wounds.
It's true that women have made an immense and invaluable contribution to Christian churchmanship in recent years, but this contribution has nothing whatsoever to do with ordination. It is a consequence of the Internet, which has brought readers together with part-time and non-professional writers -- many of whom write nonsense, but many of whom on the contrary are women of deep piety, insight, and wisdom, and whose thoughts had little chance for expression fifteen years ago.
But women's ordained ministry, even on its own terms, has been an undeniable flop. Putting aside the fact, enunciated by Catholic doctrine, that sacramental priesthood is void for women, one might still expect that the opportunities provided by non-sacramental ministries would have thrown up someone of substance -- or at least lasting influence -- over the past couple decades. Yet we find no Margaret Thatchers and no Hannah Arendts and no Jeanne Kirkpatricks among the clergy but, in their place, a inordinately high number of women who are just plain daft.
The flakiness of women ministers is a flakiness with a characteristic edge to it. It flirts with paganism and expresses itself with a facetious worldliness. I suspect this is partly due to the fact that the churches that ordain women are pro-abortion, which means the whole spiritual dimension of maternity must be amputated. The glint of the new-sharpened knife is never far from their feminism. And as if by compensation for this ideologically obedient cruelty, the same persons often display a quasi-pagan sentimentalism about nature. Katharine Jefferts Schori, we're told, dresses like a sunrise, and many other priestesses cultivate a rapturous "wind in the face" emotivism that takes the place orthodox Christian liturgy gives to the worship of God.
Strange bedfellow to this sub-Wiccan element is a strand of girlishness that's easier to illustrate than to describe. The website of the Young Women Clergy Project claims to be "powered by faith, verve, chocolate, and really great shoes." At the Beauty Tips for Ministers blog, a telling phenomenon in its own right, one finds discussions of clergy eyeliner, lingerie, and lip gloss. At ECUSA's site, we find suggestions for Thirty Ways to Celebrate Thirty Years of Women's Ordained Ministry that include the following:
- Decorate gingerbread cookies like women priests and serve at coffee hour.
You don't want to lick the frosting.
There are multiple levels of irony to this earnest goofiness. On the one hand, were we told it was all the invention of an embittered misogynist we'd be hard put to disprove it. On the other hand, it seems to have received no critique by those progressivists from whom we might have expected the wish to display a more decorous image of womanhood. The most plausible explanation for the flop and the flakiness is that the desire for ordination on the part of the women candidates and their supporters had little to do with service of the altar and a lot to do with vengeance and vandalism: getting even for past injuries by gaining access to the pulpit, and befouling the sanctuary to make it repellent to the orthodox. That's to say, the kind of women who made themselves ministers did so in order to give pain to those they believed deserved it. In this respect, and this respect only, they succeeded beyond hope or expectation. Is it any wonder they've grown bored with the whole religion thing?
Supporters of women priests predicted that the church would be transformed, and pews would overflow. But opponents were distraught. "Swamped by modernism, liberalism and feminism, the Church of England is now nothing more than a rotting carcass," lamented the Rev Francis Bown.
In the following weeks, more than 400 priests left the Church. Many took shelter in Roman Catholicism, where they were joined by high-profile parishioners such as the MPs Ann Widdecombe and John Gummer. Others made use of an opt-out clause which let them exclude the women from their parishes. In a move that is now being challenged, the legislation also barred women from becoming bishops. These are still open wounds.
It's true that women have made an immense and invaluable contribution to Christian churchmanship in recent years, but this contribution has nothing whatsoever to do with ordination. It is a consequence of the Internet, which has brought readers together with part-time and non-professional writers -- many of whom write nonsense, but many of whom on the contrary are women of deep piety, insight, and wisdom, and whose thoughts had little chance for expression fifteen years ago.
But women's ordained ministry, even on its own terms, has been an undeniable flop. Putting aside the fact, enunciated by Catholic doctrine, that sacramental priesthood is void for women, one might still expect that the opportunities provided by non-sacramental ministries would have thrown up someone of substance -- or at least lasting influence -- over the past couple decades. Yet we find no Margaret Thatchers and no Hannah Arendts and no Jeanne Kirkpatricks among the clergy but, in their place, a inordinately high number of women who are just plain daft.
The flakiness of women ministers is a flakiness with a characteristic edge to it. It flirts with paganism and expresses itself with a facetious worldliness. I suspect this is partly due to the fact that the churches that ordain women are pro-abortion, which means the whole spiritual dimension of maternity must be amputated. The glint of the new-sharpened knife is never far from their feminism. And as if by compensation for this ideologically obedient cruelty, the same persons often display a quasi-pagan sentimentalism about nature. Katharine Jefferts Schori, we're told, dresses like a sunrise, and many other priestesses cultivate a rapturous "wind in the face" emotivism that takes the place orthodox Christian liturgy gives to the worship of God.
Strange bedfellow to this sub-Wiccan element is a strand of girlishness that's easier to illustrate than to describe. The website of the Young Women Clergy Project claims to be "powered by faith, verve, chocolate, and really great shoes." At the Beauty Tips for Ministers blog, a telling phenomenon in its own right, one finds discussions of clergy eyeliner, lingerie, and lip gloss. At ECUSA's site, we find suggestions for Thirty Ways to Celebrate Thirty Years of Women's Ordained Ministry that include the following:
- Decorate gingerbread cookies like women priests and serve at coffee hour.
You don't want to lick the frosting.
There are multiple levels of irony to this earnest goofiness. On the one hand, were we told it was all the invention of an embittered misogynist we'd be hard put to disprove it. On the other hand, it seems to have received no critique by those progressivists from whom we might have expected the wish to display a more decorous image of womanhood. The most plausible explanation for the flop and the flakiness is that the desire for ordination on the part of the women candidates and their supporters had little to do with service of the altar and a lot to do with vengeance and vandalism: getting even for past injuries by gaining access to the pulpit, and befouling the sanctuary to make it repellent to the orthodox. That's to say, the kind of women who made themselves ministers did so in order to give pain to those they believed deserved it. In this respect, and this respect only, they succeeded beyond hope or expectation. Is it any wonder they've grown bored with the whole religion thing?
These are Anglicans ... so their “orders” are invalid anyway ...
LOL! That's *perfect*!
I was trying to think of a nice way to say that "women priests" is an oxymoron, but you've hit the nail on the head.
Indeed - but these are the model that "Womenpriests" look to.
I had forgotten that claim that the "ordination" of women would create a tidal wave of Anglicans returning to the fold.
More people go to church in Birmingham, AL on a Sunday than in all of England.
Palsied Cardiologists and their Continuing Struggle.
If women were Priests that would make Mary a lesbian theologically speaking.
What you say about women priests is ttue, I think, of many liberal male priests. Thet get ordainied or remain in the Church to get revenge, to discredit an orthodoxy they ave abandoned, by mocking it.
I notice your keyword Episcopal.
If that is what the Episcopal Church wants to practice I have no comment.
I recall reading years ago, when the feminists pointed to the number of female doctors in the USSR, that they omitted to mention that as the number of females rose, the number of males in the profession dropped, until it was perceived as a female thing, and almost no males were interested. Seems to be what I'm seeing in my parish with the altar girls: for several months, summer into fall, I never saw one altar boy at the Mass I attend.
That gawd-awful series has not "done a lot" for you, dear. Quite the opposite.
It was simply one more nail in the coffin of organized religion in the UK, which has been in the vanguard of bringing religion into disrepute. Take a look at any British production in which there is a minister of religion. That minister will usually be Church of England and a well meaning but totally naive buffoon who's out of touch with the real world.
Has it resulted in more people returning to church? An increase in faith? I don't think so.
The good news is that pretty soon, these fakers dressed up in their costume jewelry will be alone in their empty churches. The sane will have left for sound doctrine elsewhere and their fellow non-believers will have entirely ceased the practice of religion.
What a wonderful "sign of acceptance"! People will watch this nonsense on a sit-com but couldn't imagine taking it seriously enough to get up for it on a Sunday morning.
Anglican ping
So is The Episcopal Church here in the States.
Let's pretend I accept your premise for a moment. What model did these women look to?
Presumably the Scots Kirk that allowed women to preach starting in the late 40s.
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