THEY CALLED IT “a celebration” — and so, I suppose, in a sense it was. For ten years ago next month the first women were ordained as priests within the Church of England. At the Eucharist held at St Paul’s Cathedral last weekend to mark the anniversary, the Bishop of London himself presided — and that, again, could be interpreted as a sign of progress.
For Richard Chartres, the No 3 figure in the Anglican hierarchy since 1995, was never regarded as being exactly in the vanguard of this particular revolution. (So far as I know, he has never yet ordained a woman priest.) Accordingly, when he told us last Saturday morning that we had all come together “in a spirit of joy”, it was possible to get a distinct feeling of the ground beginning to shift under the C of E’s feet.
Yet in the decade since the original 32 women priests were ordained at Bristol Cathedral on March 12, 1994, progress has been painfully slow. True, the C of E now has more than 2,000 “priestesses” (as their predominantly Anglo-Catholic critics still insist on calling them), but their acquisition has been bought at a heavy price, much of it paid by the women concerned.
Whatever else it may be, the C of E — specifically excluded from the provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 — is certainly not an “equal opportunities employer”. There are still episcopal areas — and even the occasional diocese — where no woman wearing a dog collar is encouraged to show her face. Worse than that, in some ways, are the isolated pockets of resistance — individual parishes where, under the C of E’s current rules, a resolution can be passed denying the right of a woman priest to celebrate Holy Communion or even to give absolution at matins and evensong. As if that were not enough, a second resolution can also be carried serving notice that, in the event of a vacancy, no one but a male need bother to apply to be incumbent, priest-in-charge or even a team vicar of the benefice in question.
Leaving aside the whole question of Provincial Episcopal Visitors (or “flying bishops”), these provisions deserve, I believe, to be more widely known. But they are not, of course, where the battle now lies. Slowly but remorselessly the C of E is being brought to realise that it cannot hope to hold the line against women bishops for much longer. To its credit, Downing Street only last week chose a woman to be the next dean of one of our great cathedrals, Salisbury. Canon June Osborne will thus join an already existing dean, the Very Rev Vivienne Faull of Leicester — although her appointment, originally as provost, was made not by the Crown but by the bishop of the diocese.
In terms of salary and status a dean has never been the equivalent of a bishop, although some bishops have cheerfully ended up running cathedrals rather than dioceses. But with two women now serving as deans and at least three or four as archdeacons, the glass ceiling protecting the episcopate looks more and more indefensible.
It is also manifestly unfair — and, from the Church’s point of view totally wasteful. No one, for example, who heard the Rev Angela Tilby, the vice-principal of Westcott House, Cambridge, deliver the sermon at the St Paul’s celebration service last weekend can have been left in any doubt that she is the equal of, if not the superior to, most men currently sitting on the episcopal bench. Already a well-known broadcaster, Miss Tilby will be 54 next month. She is thus much in the position of figures like Maude Royden, who found that time had cheated them of their vocations to become women priests.
Will the Church wait until the supposed target date of 2008 to follow the example of the United States, Canada and New Zealand in appointing women as bishops? Oddly enough, there is a joker in the pack — and that could conceivably hasten the process along. So anxious are some of the High Church irreconcilables to achieve their heart’s desire of a “third province” that they are rumoured to be ready to give their temporary support to a unisex episcopate, if only as a tactical ploy. Their calculation, apparently, is that, with women installed on the bench of bishops, the case for a separate ideological province (complete with its own primate or archbishop) would become irrefutable.
It may well be that no more cynical action has been contemplated since some right-wing Labour MPs, who were anyway planning to join the SDP, deliberately voted for Michael Foot in the 1980 parliamentary leadership election. Yet in terms of subterranean intrigue priests have never had much to learn from politicians, and such a “dirty tricks” outcome is by no means improbable. Only one thing is certain to stop it in its tracks — and that would be a recovery by the Archbishop of Canterbury of the kind of courage that deserted him in his confrontation with the evangelicals over the appointment of a gay bishop last year. Sooner or later the C of E will have to learn the lesson that pandering to prejudice seldom achieves anything.
MEDIEVAL MUSICAL CHAIRS
A LOT has been made, some of it of a mocking kind, of 69-year-old Michael Mates finally becoming a Privy Counsellor, if only to qualify him to sit on the Butler committee. But virtually nothing has been heard of the stranger fact that three of the other four members of the committee — Lord Butler of Brockwell himself, Sir John Chilcot and Field Marshal Lord Inge — have also had to be sworn of the Privy Council in order, presumably, to be trusted with the secrets of MI6.
What a pantomime this whole Privy Council business has become! Politicians pass membership of it around among themselves with great solemnity, but in the normal course of events no civil servant, not even a Cabinet Secretary, ever gets offered such a bauble. The last mandarin I can recall having been made a PC was Sir Patrick Nairne — and that was in order to permit him to sit on the Franks committee looking into the causes of the Falklands conflict.
If the purely political exploitation of this particular piece of medieval flummery felt faintly ridiculous then, it looks positively absurd now. So much for the “new Britain” that “new Labour” was supposed to create.
