Jo Bailey Wells, an Anglican ‘bishop’
Posted on 02/06/2024 2:16:10 PM PST by ebb tide
Jo Bailey Wells, an Anglican ‘bishop’
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — A female Anglican prelate gave a speech to Pope Francis and his Council of Cardinals on Monday as part of the group’s discussions on the “role of women in the Church.”
On February 5, the Vatican released images and sparse details about the current Council of Cardinals meeting being held at the Vatican, revealing that the group was addressed by three women during their discussions.
According to details provided by Vatican News, “Rev. Dr. Jo Bailey Wells, bishop of the Church of England and Deputy Secretary General of the Anglican Communion,” was one of three women who addressed the meeting.
Joining Wells in addressing the group were two Catholic religious: “Sister Linda Pocher, daughter of Mary Help of Christians and professor of Christology and Mariology at the Pontifical Faculty of Educational Sciences Auxilium in Rome; Giuliva Di Berardino, a consecrated woman of the Ordo Virginum of the Diocese of Verona, a teacher and head of spirituality courses and spiritual exercises.”
Jo Bailey Wells seated alongside two Catholic religious, addressing the C9 group.
The C9 – as the group is known – is continuing the examination of the “role of women in the Church,” a subject it began discussing in December 2023. The timing of such discussions is significant, given that the 2023 Synod on Synodality interim report highlighted an “urgent” call for canon law to be changed in order to allow more female governance roles.
Such themes from the Synod have been emerging in the form of calls for female deacons, a topic that makes Wells’ presentation to the pope and his C9 group even more significant. While no precise information was given about the nature of her address, Wells’ entire career in the Anglican church has been marked by her stance at the forefront in the implementation of female orders.
Described as “a pioneer in the spread of equality between the sexes,” Wells began her theological training at Cambridge University’s Corpus Christi College before the Anglican church had even voted to allow female so-called priests.
Wells was made an Anglican deacon in 1995 and a priest in 1996, the latter being just four years after female priests were allowed and only two years after the first woman was ordained. After female “bishops” were permitted in 2014 and first created in 2015, Wells was made the bishop of Dorking.
She described her desire for female priests as being not “so much a feminist issue as a matter of biblical interpretation – on which, it seems to me, there is room to differ.”
As noted in a 2017 interview she gave to her alma mater, after her ordination Wells:
became the first female Dean in the UK, at Clare College. In 2013 she became Chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman ever in that office. And when last year [2016] she was consecrated Suffragan Bishop of Dorking – under the Bishop of Guildford, Andrew Watson, another Corpus alumnus (m1979) – she became only the tenth woman in the Church’s history in the episcopate, and the first from our College.
Wells is now a key figure in the ecumenical sphere as bishop for Episcopal Ministry in the Anglican Communion and, as such, has interacted closely with the Holy See on a number of interreligious events, such as the Kazakhstan Congress of Leaders.
Commenting on her presence before the pope and the C9, Deacon Nick Donnelly wrote that Catholics “couldn’t have a stronger signal that Bergoglio is planning the faux ordination of women deacons, with a trajectory towards the faux ordination of women priests and bishops.”
As noted by Wells herself, the progression from female priests to female bishops in the Church of England was simply “a matter of time.”
“I thought we had to bide our time to have sufficient women priests with the right experience to be seen to be offering leadership. Then it just becomes common sense, it becomes blindingly obvious because the leadership is hampered without them,” she stated in 2017.
Similar concerns about such a progression have been raised by Catholics – both clerical and lay – about the designs of the Synod on Synodality and its call for increased female governance. Indeed, the campaign for female deacons continues to receive vocal support from leading members of the Synod, as evidenced by Cardinal Blase Cupich advocating for recognition of women “pastors” who are already “serving as the head of communities because they don’t have enough priests.”
READ: Pope Francis’ ‘synodal process’ is opening the gates of unrestrained heterodoxy
Pope Francis established a 12-member commission to study the issue of women deacons in August 2016, and the commission included a leading advocate of ordaining women deacons, with former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Cardinal Luis Ladaria, SJ, as its president. With another commission then drawn up in 2020, the 2023 Synod report called for the results of both studies to be presented at the October 2024 Synod meetings.
Pope John Paul II, in his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, condemned female ordination, writing: “I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”
The Polish pope also quoted from Pope Paul VI’s 1975 letter to the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury, in which the pope wrote that “the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God’s plan for his Church.”
This letter, former CDF prefect Cardinal Gerhard Müller explained, refers to the diaconate as well.
“It is certainly without doubt, however, that this definitive decision from Pope John Paul II is indeed a dogma of the Faith of the Catholic Church and that this was of course the case already before this Pope defined this truth as contained in Revelation in the year 1994,” Cardinal Müller told LifeSite’s Dr. Maike Hickson.
READ: Vatican’s former doctrine head: Ban on female deacons, priests an infallible Catholic ‘dogma’
He further noted that “the impossibility that a woman validly receives the Sacrament of Holy Orders in each of the three degrees [deacon, priest, bishop] is a truth contained in Revelation and it is thus infallibly confirmed by the Church’s Magisterium and presented as to be believed.”
Ping
Papa Frank: But can you safely back the church van into the garage?
This “bishop”, she is also married to a “priest”.
If the Argentine likes this nonsense so much, then he should go join the Anglican church where they embrace all the insanities. He could be the pope of England.
Bergoglio never goes backwards.
....
Rev. Jo Bailey Wells, who is deputy secretary general of the Anglican Communion, was one of the first generation of women to be ordained a vicar in the Church of England in 1995. Married to an Anglican clergyman with two children, she has also served as chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Anglican bishop, who in the past has praised “gender history” for highlighting how “institutions are gendered and how institutions gender individuals,” also addressed an interreligious meeting attended by Pope Francis in Kazakhstan in October 2022 when she reportedly said “gender equality is part of God’s plans.”
A “religion” founded by a gluttonous serial murderer.
Bishopess? Bishotrix?
Bishopette
Everyone in that room should be defrocked.
aNTI pope. POS sent to destroy.
They should have asked her if she believes Jesus rose from the dead in His physical body.
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