THE Church of England will force traditionalists for the first time to accept that the ordination of women as priests and bishops is valid.

In the first step towards women bishops, the General Synod voted yesterday to enforce a church law that upholds the ordination of all bishops, priests and deacons without exception.

Until now, an Act of Synod has protected Anglican Catholics who refuse to accept the ordination of women as valid and allowed them to declare their parishes “no-go zones” for women priests.

Traditionalists do not want women to have the power of ordination — something they would have as bishops — and have asked for a “third province”, in effect a church within a church, to ensure that apostolic succession in the Church remains “untainted” by women’s hands.

Earlier this year bishops tried to draw up a plan that would have created havens for traditionalists, but their attempts collapsed in disarray. Yesterday the General Synod agreed in York to set up a new group to tackle the framing of the legislation for women bishops. The legislation will be voted on in about five years and will need a two-thirds majority to pass.

Members agreed that those against the ordination of women could still be considered “loyal Anglicans”, but declared that any new arrangements for traditionalists had to be “consistent with Canon A4”, the church law stating that all those ordained in the Church of England are “lawfully ordained” and must be accepted by all as “truly bishops, priests or deacons”.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said that the issue was becoming ever more complex, but the question was not going to go away, “no matter how complex the challenge of finding our way forward”.

He said that the Church was looking for a “real engagement between contending voices rather than a bare exchange of claims”, and that the issue posed “searching questions” about the kind of church the Church of England was.

“We shall resolve this only as people from across the spectrum work directly with each other, trying their best to calculate what are acceptable sacrifices or anomalies, what are for them betrayals of principle,” Dr Williams said.

The General Synod backed a call on Saturday to “welcome and affirm” the view of the majority of the House of Bishops that women bishops were in principle “theologically justified”.

However, the Archdeacon of Pontefract, the Ven Jonathan Greener, said that although he was keen for women bishops, he had “profound reservations” about the motion. He said that the new group being set up had in effect been given “the brief from hell”.

The Very Rev Vivienne Faull, the Dean of Leicester, who is tipped as a future bishop, said that the debate showed that there was still much to do. Synod members would need to be “generously imaginative”, she said, for the future and “build trust rather than walls of division.”

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