Yes, but not now Tom Sutcliffe L ike St Augustine, who
prayed to be virt- uous but not yet, the Church of England always seems to be saying one thing and doing another. No different from any parliamentary body, the General Synod of the Church of England allows itself the indulgence of passing motions and endors- ing wishful thinking with a simple majority. If more than 50 per cent of a General Synod in 1975 thought there could be `no theological objections' to the ordination of Women, that is held to be the stated opinion of the Anglican Church. It is repeated in Propaganda in the media throughout the Anglican Communion, and readily acted upon in some corners of the Communion where innovations in church order can be less cautiously achieved — such as among the more congregationally governed American Episcopalians, or among the Predominantly low church Anglicans of Canada. Never mind that only a minority of Provinces in the Anglican Communion has, so far introduced women priests, the Arch- bishop of Toronto, Dr Edward Scott, last Month felt justified in rapping the Church of England over the knuckles. Women priests are part of Anglican life now, he says, and Anglicans in England will just have to smarten up and accept them.
Ordinary mortals may be forgiven for wondering why, then, objections — mostly of a solidly theological variety — go on be- ing raised, and how the General Synod finds itself unable in practice to raise the re- quired two-thirds majority to pass the necessary legislation. The impression given is that the Synod is undemocratic and that the clergy (the house most frequently fail- ing to find the magic two-thirds) are hide- bound traditionalists, opposed to women's liberation. Why maintain the two-thirds re- quirement, which is the real stumbling block affecting such constitutional innova- tions as women priests or the Covenanting scheme for reunion with a few small non- conformist churches? A majority is a ma- jority. Such a high hurdle may be a corn- `Since we rescued him from an experimen- tal laboratory we've got him down to ten a day.' mon parliamentary requirement ° in coun- tries where there are written constitutions, but are the issues in question really con- stitutional? Should the Church of England get itself out of this legislative log-jam with, perhaps, an extraordinary appeal to all communicant members in a binding referendum?
General Synod, however, is unlike the Westminster parliament from which its power derives. It is not a sovereign body, and its authority is by no means clear. In practice it has seemed most effective as a serious check on the powers of the unrepresentative bench of bishops. The house of bishops in General Synod is usual- ly way out of line with either the clergy or the laity. The bishops were far more en- thusiastic for both Covenanting and women priests. Left to themselves they would give an impression of that virtually united mind which the other houses prove the Church of England does not possess. Seeing themselves as the modern representatives of traditional church authority, the Bishops seldom measure their opinions against those traditional standards that they are supposed to maintain. The bench of bishops, with a few notable exceptions on the evangelical and catholic wings, remains predominantly Erastian — and the Crown Appointments Commission is making only a small change in that fact.
A solid body of opinion in the General Synod, probably a quarter made out of con- servative evangelicals and catholics, main- tains that it has no authority on its own ac- count to introduce unscriptural innovations such as women priests (though catholics would allow such a question to be considered by a universal Council of the Church, inclu- ding the Orthodox and Roman Catholics). Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, who last month voted in favour of Covenanting and women priests, seemed in his speeches to be expressing doubts and reservations. The truth is that the Anglicans are terribly divid- ed. They are a very long way from the overall consensus recommended by St Benedict, who propounded that where there were divi- sions of opinion Christians operating under his rules should simply continue praying un- til they were all of one mind. If Anglicans seriously wanted unity among themselves, let alone reunion with other Christians, they would be wise to exclude from reconsidera- tion issues like Covenanting and women priests which are demonstrably controver- sial. It is simply not true that Anglicans can- not continue their real task of Christian witness until they have torn themselves apart over these peripheral (if serious and reso- nant) matters of Church order.
General Synod rejected Covenanting, but then went on to approve by simple majority Deaconess Diana McClatchey's motion stat- ing that Anglican women priests from over- seas should be allowed to exercise their ministry in England. If the legislation necessary to give effect to this motion achieves the same majorities, it will fail in both the houses of clergy and laity. Even if General Synod were to vote in one body, it
would only on these figures achieve 63 per cent. On a similar basis Covenanting did not in fact get two-thirds of the votes of General Synod as a whole. For the time being, Dea- coness McClatchey's motion represents the thinking of the Church of England. It will be hard for the few bishops opposed to ordain- ing women to object if battalions of impor- ted American and Canadian women priests do demonstration eucharists all over the place, in the full glare of publicity, even though these eucharists will be definitely seen as irregular once the necessary legisla- tion has failed in General Synod. A pro- found impression of muddle and disorder will have been given.
The solution which might save the Synod's reputation for consistency and avoid giving this impression of fecklessness in the Church of England would be to change the voting procedure with motions in General Synod that have constitutional im- plications. A committee could sort out which motions came into this category, and should therefore be obliged to pass the two- thirds hurdle. Two-thirds, in areas where massive consensus is needed to maintain unity, is a majority considerably lower than the three-quarters required by the non-con- formist Covenanting churches, and by the Church of England when it contemplated reunion with the Methodists a decade ago a majority, incidentally, that it is claimed the nonconformist churches would not have got if they had consulted their memberships truly democratically.
But what all this holy disorder really in- dicates is the deeply divided nature of world Anglicanism, that bizarre relic of the British Empire. Dr Bowlby, the Bishop of South- wark, warned that the Anglican Commu- nion might break up, if the Church of England refused to accept the validity of women priests from overseas. He is certain- ly right that the ordination of women has deep implications for such intercommunion as at present exists — with the Old Catholics in Holland and Germany, for in- stance. But it is by no means a foregone conclusion that Anglicanism as a whole will happily go along with those provinces which have jumped the gun on women's or- dination. It is pretty astonishing that the en- tire Anglican Communion did not consider the issue important enough to require a world-wide Anglican representative council to make the decision. But the separate Anglican churches vary so much in character and order that few would happily embrace that implicit interference in such a conciliar scheme.
In fact, acceptance or rejection of women priests usually provides an indication of the ecclesiastical tone of the province (or pro- vinces) in question. Thus in Australia, where the archdioceses of Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth have strong catholic sectors objecting, and the archdiocese of Sydney has an overwhelming conservative evangelical bias also in opposition, the or- dination of women priests still looks unlike- ly though the Church of England's example be followed. In South Africa and the West Indies, where Anglicans tend to be closer to Rome, women priests look very distant. In Canada, where the issue has caused little opposition, the Anglicans look well set to join with Protestant churches in a non- Catholic reunion scheme.
Anglicans overseas, of course, do not have the Church of England's Establish- ment — its pretension to cater for the entire nation in a kind of spiritual National Health Service. Anglicans in the former im- perial territories remain what they always were, a sect among many. The Church of England feels special responsibilities. Even evangelicals here are inclined to hold that Anglicans in Britain are the Catholic church (a role that a woman minister of the Kirk recently upheld for the Church of Scotland in its area in a letter to the Guardian). Overseas Anglicans sometimes complain that the Church of England is scarcely part of the Anglican Communion at all, except through the special position (or bed of nails) of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In Rome, it is said, possible schemes of recon- ciliation with the Church of England are unlikely to be extended elsewhere in the Anglican Communion.
Although at the time the creation of the Church of South India,- uniting Anglicans with other Protestant denominations, seem- ed a one-off affair, it may finally prove the model to be followed in many parts of the old Empire. But it should not be assumed that the Church of England itself will pro- ceed that way. Despite the Lambeth Con- ference picture of polychrome bishops iden- tically clad in rochet and chimere, the myth of the worldwide Anglican Communion has even less substance than the concept of the British Commonwealth, which it .vaguely resembles. The Church of England maY well prefer to go it alone, whatever happens in Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong and the United States.
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