Anglican squabbles

The BBC News website has had a couple of reports about the decision of Philip North, the Anglican suffragan Bishop of Burnley to withdraw his acceptance of the Bishopric of Sheffield. The more recent version can be seen via the link below:


Church of England at war after Bishop Philip North's U-turn

Why is there so much anger among Anglicans after Philip North chose not to be Bishop of Sheffield?

As the articles point out Bishop North, previous to his elevation to Burnley, had withdrawn under similar pressures from accepting the Bishopric of Whitby, the usually Anglo-Catholic suffragan of the diocese of York.

Several thoughts come to my mind about this sorry state of things in the Church of England, of which I was once a member.

Firstly there is the rigid feminist and liberal intolerance that is now entrenched amongst so many of those who have chaplaincies and deaneries - read the article - and those they support and encourage. There are no enforceable safeguards to protect the consciences and opinions of traditionalist Anglo-Catholics, Evangelicals or anyone else who objects to the foisting of women clergy upon what still claims to be part of a fractured but historic Church. That failure to give proper safeguards contributes to the creeping decay of the Anglican Church - and it really ought to offend the tender consciences of those very liberals who doubtless claim it everywhere else save in the organisation they belong to...

Secondly, Anglo-Catholics really should wake up and smell the incense ( or lack thereof ) and do the sensible thing and seek the Roman option either directly or through the Ordinariate. One Anglican friend told me recently that the present trend in Rome inhibits him from making the move. I heard what he said, but it really should not deter - things and people and office holders change...

Thirdly, I feel sorry for Bishop Philip North, whom I have met occasionally through Pusey House and when he was at Walsingham. I gather that his ministry as Bishop of Burnley has been widely appreciated by Evangelicals as much as Anglo-Catholics and that he has been very successful in working with church youth groups.

The last time I encountered him was before he became a bishop at a study day at Pusey House on the proposal to establish the Ordinariate back in, I suppose, 2010. He was then arguing that the established and recognised nature of the Church of England enabled him to reach people he would not be able to do were he to join the Ordinariate. He was, therefore, not attracted by that project. He may just have had a point - a point - but now the squawking elite in the Church of England are preventing him reaching the people of the Sheffield diocese. It is not an especially Anglo-Catholic minded one, but with some notable if isolated centres ( or so it used to be) and he surely has a right to be heard there.

Women Bishops

So the General Synod of the Church of England has finally, today, gone through all the necessary stages and legislated for Women Bishops.

As a former Anglican, who has found his true home in the Catholic Church I am no longer hurt by this move - still less, of course, affected - though I can still be nauseated by the prospect. I am however saddened - saddened at the pain caused to those who cannot accept this move yet wish to remain in the communion of their birth, saddened by the erosion of a tradition and claim to Catholicity, and saddened by the loss of a chance, however slim it may in reality have been, of some form of corporate re-union. Without the issue we would not have had the Ordinariates, but equally we might, just might perhaps, have had the possibility of the whole Church of England becoming the Ordinariate...

 

The historian in me does note what a day it is to choose to hold this vote - the 456th anniversary of the death in 1558 of Queen Mary I and of Cardinal Archbishop Pole, and the accession of Queen Elizabeth I and the advent of the Elizabethan Settlement. I bet Queen Elizabeth would not have been keen on Women Bishops.

It is also the feast of both St Hilda of Whitby and St Hugh of Lincoln. I cannot imagine they looked down upon the day's events with any sense of approbation.

National Apostacy

So, 181 years to the day after John Keble's sermon on National Apostacy in St Mary's in Oxford - and 225 years after Bastille (the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 hovered ominously in the backs of the minds of the founders of the Oxford Movement as an awful warning) - the General Synod of the Church of England meeting at York has finally voted through the legislation to have women bishops. It now has to be voted through Parliament - and no-one expects opposition there. There appear to be flimsy safeguards for those who dissent from the mandated orthodoxy of equality.

Well, so far as I am concerned, 'nough said. It is no longer my direct concern, and has not been for a decade, other than to regret seeing a national instition implode in the delusion that this will somehow lead to spiritual regeneration, and also to point to the forthcoming nauseating sychophantic media circus around the appointment of the first women bishops. Presumably they will be suffragens at first - Wilma Woolwich, Katie Kingston, then we shall have the sight of diocesans - Beryl Birmingham, Tina Truron, Dora Derby, Linda Londin, Gloria Gloucester, Wendy Winton, Chrissie Chelmsford (a true Essex girl), Dorothy Dunelm, and finally Evadne Ebor, and Cathy Cantuar... Will somebody please pass the sick bags around?

No Women Bishops yet

So the long-running saga of women's ordination in the Church of England has not yet reached its endgame, or indeed the happy ending desired by its proponents, of the sanctioning of the consecration of women to the Anglican episcopate.

The issue is no longer my direct concern any more, though I retain a concern for the life of this national institution and for its place in our national life. There is also a continuing concern for those of the Anglo-Catholic tradition who remain within the Church of England.  I must admit I expected the legislation to go through, though I was aware of infomed speculation that it would fail to get the necessary votes.

The Synod vote on Tuesday was not only a rebuff of considerable magnitude on the political Richter scale to the dominant liberal ascendancy but also a rebuff to proponents in the Catholic Church both of women's ordination and to those amongst them who appeal to the laity as a means of effecting change.

Listening to Sir Tony Baldry speaking as Second Church Estates Commissioner, resplendant in his Garrick Club (men only) tie I sensed I was hearing echoes of the Gorham judgment of 1850. The General Synod was not debating the theology of consecrating women  - the pass on that has already been sold - but the legal mechanism to implement it. By refusing reasonable safeguards for those who do not accept such female appointees the Liberal Establishment secured its own defeat - no wonder they are so hurt and angry - there is, after all,  nothing so ill-liberal as a thwarted Liberal.

Despite what the Prime Minister might say about nudging the Cof E I doubt if politicians will want to spend Parliamentary time and energy, let alone whether they should, forcing through legislation that undermines the whole principle of the General Synod as set up to be an autonomous legislative bodyand risks a Church-State clash, and might well involve other denominations - and all that with the proposals on redefining marriage looming. Unlike the Prayer Book controversy of 1927-28 the politicians are not, I suspect, as theologically literate as their predecessors of eighty plus years ago, so it is possible that the equality argument is all that would be heard. The Synod may be bounced somehow, but that is more likely to drive out the Anglo-Catholics. Fortunately the Ordinariate is there to welcome them.

As an Anglican friend said to me it shows Dr Williams' knack of turning everything he touchs to dust and ashes - his Primacy will not be remembered for securing women in the episcopate, but for its failure - and Dr Welby faces even more problems than he already had waiting on the archiepiscopal desk at Lambeth.

Amongst  Catholic bloggers there are these posts on the subject from Fr Blake, Women bishops?  and Her Majesty's Ministry for Religion  and from Fr Tim Finigan Disturbing prospects after the Synod vote and  Anglicans fell just two votes short of getting wha...

 

A fifth century woman bishop?

With the General Synod of the Church of England discussing further details of its plans to enable the consecration of "women bishops" this week I somewhat hesitate to publicise the following story - I would not want to be thought in any way to encourage that sort of thing. However this incident from the fifth century may well be legendary in origin...

Yesterday, February 6th, was the feast of St Mél (d. late 5th or early 6th cenury). Mél (also Moel) is the early saint of Ardagh (county Longford). He is reputed to have been a Briton who went to Ireland with St. Patrick and who was made priest at Ardagh and he features not only in the early Lives of St Patrick but also in the Lives of St. Brigid of Kildare (to whom he is said to have given the veil). His feast on this day is recorded from the ninth century in the Martyrology of Tallaght and the Martyrology of Óengus. There is more about him here.

Nathalie Stalmans and T.M.Charles-Edwards in their article on the saints of Meath in the Oxford DNB say of St Mél:

"The evidence for the early saints is predominantly from the Patrician texts, beginning with Tírechán's Collectanea, written in the last quarter of the seventh century, but Mél (fl. 5th–early 6th cent.) of Ardagh (Ardachad) in modern co. Longford, is also a character of some importance in what has been claimed as the earliest life of Brigit, the so-called Vita prima, and in her mainly vernacular life, Bethu Brigte. The heirs of these saints, Patrick and Brigit, were competing for influence within the kingdom of southern Tethbae; Ardagh was the episcopal church of southern Tethbae, and the competition naturally centred on the principal church of the kingdom. Although there is no life of Mél, his cult seems to have been resilient. In the ninth century his feast day, 6 February, is recorded in the martyrology of Tallaght, and also in the text of the Félire Óengusso: the Félire chose the most important saints to include within its brief verses, one to each day of the year, and it is thus significant that the Irish saint chosen for 6 February was Mél. The connection between Mél and Patrick seems to have strengthened in the viking period: according to the saints' genealogies, his mother, Dar Erca, was Patrick's sister."

Pope John Paul II views the crozier of St Mel and the shrine of St Machan in 1979.

The originally ninth-century Crozier of St. Mel, discovered in 1863 near the site of the medieval cathedral, was initially believed to have been destroyed in 2009 in the Christmas Day fire in St. Mel's Cathedral in Longford town, but later reports say that at least part of it survived.

Image ardaghdiocese.org

However St Mél is said not just to have given St Brigid the veil, but to have made her a bishop. Yes, a bishop...

From the Liber Hymnorum: "It came to pass that Bishop Mél conferred on Brigit the episcopal order, although it was only the order of repentance that she desired for herself. And it is then that Mac Caille lifted up a veil over Brigit’s head ut ferunt periti; and hence Brigit’s successor is always entitled to have episcopal orders and the honour due to a bishop."

From the Book of Lismore: "For humility Brigit stayed so that she might be the last to whom a veil should be given. A fiery pillar rose from her head to the roof-ridge of the church. Then said Bishop Mél: “Come, O holy Brigit, that a veil may be sained on thy head before the other virgins.” It came to pass then, through the grace of the Holy Ghost, that the form of ordaining a bishop was read over Brigit. Mac-caille said, that a bishop’s order should not be conferred on a woman. Said Bishop Mél: “No power have I in this matter. That dignity hath been given by God unto Brigit, beyond every (other) woman.” Wherefore the men of Ireland from that time to this give episcopal honour to Brigit’s successor."

The abbesses of Kildare apparently retained this episcopal honour until a reforming Synod in 1152.

With such curious privileges around one can see why twelfth century Popes both before and after Strongbow and King Henry II were interested in reforming the Irish church.

We are not required to believe everything in an early saint's life. I suspect this story may originate in attempt to explain the particular traditional privileges of the abbess of Kildare, perhaps originating with the Celtic ( a dangerously overused term these days in respect of spiritual matters) tradition of a monastically led church, with the bishop less important than the abbot or abbess, and, I wonder, possibly in local land tenure customs and claims.

Prof. Charles-Edwards (he is the Professor of Celtic Studies here at Oxford) gives a detailed assessment of the life of St Brigid in his life of her in the recent Oxford DNB which can be read here and provides a valuable informed insight into the complexities of the era. This is a topic and period about which I know very little, but I do apprecaite the tangled nature of the sources and admire the skill of those who can disentangle them.

With acknowledgements to the posts by John Dillon and Maeve Callan on the Medieval Religion discussion group.