THE BISHOP of London has, I see, expressed his fear that the Church of England is in danger of becoming “pedestrian and dull”.
He should set his mind at rest: in the next week or two the Church of England is due to undergo as much excitement as can possibly be good for it.
The root of the trouble, as usual, is sex — or as churchmen sometimes prefer to call it, gender. Next month a committee set up under the chairmanship of Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, is due to produce a report on the vexed topic of women bishops.
The committee has been sitting for a full three years but all that it has managed to come up with is a list of eight options (one more, in fact, than on the list the Joint Committee on Lords Reform produced a couple of years ago, which ran into the sand because none of the proposed solutions was able to attain a majority in the House of Commons).
One might have thought that the Church of England, with its relatively short experience of democracy, would have been able to learn lessons from the experience of a much more mature legislature — but not a bit of it. The Bishop of Rochester’s 15-strong working party has come up with what is, in effect, a shopping list. And a pretty ludicrous one it is, too.
Its suggested courses of action for the future range from a kind of ecclesiastical Noddy land in which women could become suffragan bishops but not diocesan ones, through an even greater fantasy world in which they could hope to be full-scale diocesan bishops but never Archbishop of Canterbury or Archbishop of York, to a somewhat dismal and defeated maintenance of the status quo under which our present crop of women priests may become deans or archdeacons but never break through the stained-glass ceiling to sit on the episcopal bench.
In their earnestness and innocence, the bishop and his colleagues do not seem to have twigged that all they have done is make themselves into public laughing-stocks. The man on the Clapham omnibus sees no more reason against a unisex episcopate than he does against a unisex hairdresser’s. Nor is that simply an outsider’s view. As the shrewder Anglo-Catholics have always realised, the die was cast when women were first ordained as priests in 1994.
Once females were admitted to the priesthood, there was absolutely no theological reason why they should not be allowed to qualify as bishops as well. It is the Anglican Prayer Book, after all, that refers to “the Orders of bishops, priests and deacons” and at no point does it seek to separate them.
So the endeavour of the Bishop of Rochester and his working party to discover some mythical middle ground will, rightly, be recognised for what it is — a none too skilful piece of equivocation designed to conceal a glaring example of sex discrimination. The plan, apparently, is that the various contradictory proposals should be debated at the next General Synod, due to be held in February.
The hopes of the resisters are equally clear. In the general air of confusion engendered, the opponents of women bishops believe they will have a fighting chance to emerge with the prize they have long since coveted, the creation of a Third Province based on the notion of sexual apartheid. Only a faith which has fundamentally lost its nerve could contemplate such a compromise in the name of a bogus unity. And it remains astonishing that the Archbishop of Canterbury is apparently prepared to give the idea house-room even in the ample chambers of his own mind.
But then poor Dr Rowan Williams could be forgiven for believing that he is currently being beleaguered and assaulted on all sides. Even before the Bishop of Rochester’s report will have smote him on one cheek he will have to proffer the other to be struck by the homophobes within the Church of England. The Lambeth Commission — an ad hoc body set up under Dr Robin Eames, the Archbishop of Armagh — has been meeting now for nearly a year to consider the proper retaliatory action to be taken against the Episcopal Church in the United States for its act of indiscipline in allowing a gay bishop to be consecrated in the diocese of New Hampshire.
Such punitive action hardly looks like an essentially Christian activity and it is impossible to see anything but damage coming out of this particular piece of reprisal. Conceived in panic, it seems doomed to end in recrimination. No situation is ever surer to delight the outsider than the sight of those who purport to uphold standards of forgiveness and charity failing to live up to them.
Instead of fearing a boring future, the Bishop of London should perhaps brace himself for hearing once again that familiar, derisive cry down the centuries: “See how these Christians love one another.”
Decision time for Derry
WHAT IS to be done about Derry Irvine? It is well over a year since he ceased to be Lord Chancellor and the chances of any further public appointment seem to recede every day. Why, for example, has he not been made a law lord? There is, after all, established precedent for an ex-lord chancellor continuing to sit in the highest court in the land. Lord Dilhorne may not have been the most distinguished lawyer ever to sit on the Woolsack but that did not stop him from becoming a full-time law lord in 1969.
I am told by the House of Lords that Lord Irvine remains “eligible to exercise the judicial function of the House” but he would not be popular if he tried to do so without an invitation. Three new law lords were created at the beginning of this year and none is due to retire until 2007. Meanwhile, tick-tock goes the clock.
Cash for conferences
NO SURPRISES in the two television celebrities chosen to act as guest inquisitors at last week’s Tory party conference. Both Martyn Lewis, the former “good news” broadcaster of the BBC, and Michael Brunson, the former ITN political editor to whom John Major famously commented that his right-wing opponents were “bastards”, behaved thoroughly professionally.
Although both are now retired, I still wonder about the propriety of active performers accepting such engagements. It was Lord Beaverbrook who first said that there should always be an “armed frontier” between politicians and journalists.
That, for my money, was one of the few things that the old rascal ever got right.
Delivery failure
PRIVATE complaints should not feature in public columns. But here goes anyway. In my part of London the post, which used to pop through my letter box twice a day, arrived between 1pm and 2pm last Thursday, came not at all on Friday and on Saturday just made it by lunchtime. Talk about the decline and fall of a public service.
Meanwhile, the individual previously responsible for letters delivery at the Post Office’s HQ is about to waltz off with all the money due to him on a year’s rolling contract, to say nothing of a “performance bonus” for last year of £150,000.
We all know that the British are a phlegmatic people, but this sort of patient stoicism on all our parts strikes me as absurd.
