It had to come. Of course it did. In 1992, watching the polite but passionate second debate on women priests from the General Synod gallery, three things seemed obvious to this onlooker: that women would be priests, that refuseniks, such as Ann Widdecombe and John Gummer, would flounce off to the Roman Catholic Church in dudgeon and that before long, women would rise to the episcopate and nobody would turn a hair.

After all, if you believe in ordination as a sacrament, then accepting women at the altar is the really big step. Making them bishops is just - well - promotion. Women teachers become heads and once females got into Parliament it was only a matter of time before they were ministers. The episcopal glass ceiling could not last long.

I was wrong. It did. The Anglican Church's talent for compromise and fudge has enabled the illogical situation to totter on for 16 years, and even now we have the extraordinary ruling that those who feel - as the Bishop of Manchester put it - “unable to receive the ministry of women bishops” may have “complementary” male ones on tap. Anglicanism, says the report, will “leave generous space for those who in conscience cannot receive this development”.

This remarkable tolerance of a cherry-picking approach to religious dogma underlines a fundamental difference in tone between Anglicanism - always ready to absorb and fossilise dissent, even if it turns itself into an odd-shaped entity - and the Catholic Church's official emphasis on obedience. Papal “infallibility” and clerical authority in Catholicism have little truck with “generous space” or “inability” to swallow dogma whole, as was dramatically demonstrated just before Christmas with the Pope's reiterated and scientifically dubious rejection of homosexual love. The Vatican also still holds the line against women in the priesthood, and indeed has stated that women bishops would “create new obstacles to unity” between the Churches: not that such unity has seemed even remotely likely.

Times Archive, 1984: Fear of divisiveness on women priests

If these ladies are ordained, what about the strain on the loyalties of those women who think this is gravely wrong? Where are we to go?

• Runcie favours women priests

• Women priests 'obstacle' to unity

• Letter from the Bishop of Manchester and others

Related Links

• Women reach for Anglican bishops' chairs

• Historic deal paves way for first women bishops

So this move will push Catholics further away; but interestingly, that widened, now seemingly permanent gulf of difference may well have the unintended result of advancing Anglican thought about the nature and validity of homosexuality. Which would be doubly ironic, since many gay Anglican clergy, it is thought, inhabit the High Anglo-Catholic wing of their Church.

But all in all, there is a certain civility about the via media Anglicana: a certain willingness to accept human diversity, which to outsiders is strangely endearing. Thinking back to that anxious, thoughtful synod of 16 years ago, I find myself wishing luck to the new women bishops; but also to the men saddled with the awkward role of “complementary bishops”. How they will all get on when introduced at social gatherings is anybody's guess; but it is unlikely to be croziers at dawn.

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