THE Church of England is expected to commit itself today to the ordination of women bishops — the cost being unity with the Roman Catholic Church.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy- O’Connor, the leader of the four million Roman Catholics in England and Wales, expressed disappointment yesterday at the end of an ecumenical dream.

It was “inevitable” that there would be women bishops in the Anglican Church and so ecumenism was “at a plateau”. As co-chairman of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission for 16 years, the Cardinal spent much of his earlier ministry bringing about closer relations between the two churches.

Yesterday he said that he was saddened that many of its conclusions, such as in the area of authority, had not been “received” into the Anglican Church.

The General Synod, meeting not far from the Cardinal’s base in Westminster, was told that Roman Catholics remained committed to working with the Church of England. But Father Anthony Milner, the Catholic representative at the synod, asked how Catholics could continue an “impaired” dialogue when disagreements within the Anglican Church itself made it “hard to make out who you are talking to sometimes”.

In a paper to the synod, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference said that ordaining women bishops would be “a risk too far for the Church of England”.

Anglican orders were declared by a 19th-century papal bull to be “absolutely null and utterly void”, but the Catholic bishops said that women bishops in the Church of England would raise “serious questions” about the nature of the orders. Any doubts about their validity involved “serious doubts about the validity above all of the Eucharist celebrated by the priests concerned”.

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