LONDON — The mood of crisis in the Church of England deepened on Wednesday when bishops scheduled an emergency meeting to discuss the repercussions of the ballot at a synod a day earlier that rejected the appointment of female bishops, a change that has been debated intensely and often bitterly for the past decade.
More than 70 percent of the 446 synod votes on Tuesday were in favor of opening the church’s episcopacy to women. But the synod’s voting procedures require two-thirds majorities in each of its three “houses”: bishops, clergy and laity. Although the bishops and clergy met that test, the vote of lay members was a wafer-thin six short of a two-thirds majority.
Since the English church split with Rome under Henry VIII nearly 500 years ago, only men have served as bishops, and the outcome of the two-day synod was seen by both sides as a watershed in the wider struggle over the Church of England’s future. It pitted reformers eager to open the way for women as bishops against traditionalists, including evangelicals and so-called Anglo-Catholics, who argued that the teachings of Jesus, and the fact that the Twelve Apostles were all men, provided no biblical basis for women serving in the church’s top hierarchy.
A typical outburst against the synod vote came from a church member, David Sims, who sent an e-mail to a live blog on the BBC Web site. “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he wrote.
In the closing passage of the synod debate, a leading minister of the Church of England, Canon Rosie Harper, said a “no” vote would be a death knell for a church that surveys have shown as drawing fewer regular worshipers than Britain’s mosques. “It will inevitably be seen as the act of a dying church, more wedded to the past than committed to hope for the future,” she said.
But in a radio interview on Wednesday, John Sentamu, the archbishop of York who is the second-ranking cleric in the church hierarchy, said the church was still “very much” alive.
“This morning people have been saying the church has committed suicide, the church is dead,” he told a BBC interviewer. “Well, dead people don’t converse. We have been conversing, we have not committed suicide at all, we are very much living.”
The vote seemed certain to sharpen divisions within the English church, the historic homeland of Anglicanism. Twenty years after the church approved the ordination of female priests, which took decades, a third of its clergy members are women, many holding senior positions like canons and archdeacons. Their expectation had been that they would begin to win appointments as bishops by 2014 if the change had been approved.
It also seemed to leave the English church with little prospect of finding common ground on other deeply divisive issues, particularly the push by some for approval of same-sex marriages. The government of Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative, has said it will pass legislation approving such marriages within the next year, but powerful figures in the Church of England have vowed to shut church doors against same-sex nuptials taking place or being blessed in the churches.
Perhaps more troubling for the Anglican Communion and its 80 million followers around the world, it promised to deepen the rift on issues of gender and sexuality between liberals who predominate in the Episcopal Church in the United States and more conservative elements in the Anglican fold elsewhere in the world, including a small but powerful minority in England and a vociferous traditionalist bloc, particularly in Africa.
Women have served as bishops in the Episcopal Church for years, and a wider divergence of views on issues of gay bishops, same-sex marriages and other matters of gender and sexuality have left Anglicans and liberal Episcopalians struggling to prevent a schism that could see the church splintering into doctrinal and regional fiefs. The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, who will retire next month, has spent much of his 10 years as the senior bishop of the Church of England and symbolic head of the Anglican Communion devising complex compromises intended to prevent a schism, but has acknowledged failing to accomplish a lasting reconciliation.
The bishops in the synod, including Archbishop Williams and his recently appointed successor, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, both supporters of women as bishops, announced that they would meet in emergency session on Wednesday to review the situation arising from the vote.
Crisis in English Church After Rejection of Female Bishops
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق