WIMMINBISHOPS

The Telegraph tells us that the English Anglican Bishops have decided, by a narrow margin, to recommend General Synod to go ahead with wimminbishops without making appropriate structural provision for Catholic (or Evangelical) dissentients. I can't see any need at all for panic or distress. At first sight, it suggests to me that the proposed motion will not get the necessary two-thirds majority in the House of Bishops. In that case, it will fall. If it does get that majority, then the field will be open for us to take, without being given, the structures and future we desire and need. We could set up something like the Third Province - the solution that best suits our needs - without the consent of the liberal rump. True, this will be 'illegal', but then, so what? Are they really going to send the plods in to evict hundreds of priests and congregations? Even if they did, this would seem to me a preposterously easy martyrdom compared (for example) with the rack and the rope. As Newman once said to his brother bishops and priests at a time of great crisis, You who day by day offer up the Immaculate Lamb of God, you who hold in your hands the Incarnate Word under the visible signs which He has ordained, you who again and again drain the chalice of the Great Victim; who is to make you fear? what is to startle you? what to seduce you? who is to stop you, whether you are to suffer or to do ...

I'm not panicking yet. And I hope brethren and sistren young and old will stand firm and will not allow themselves to be divided or driven out and will follow the lead which will be decided by the leaders who have served our constituency so well since the dark days of the early nineties.

I beg Roman Catholic friends to pray for us to have the wisdom and resolution that we need, mindful that this could be the end-game which leads to that realignment among the inheritors of the Catholic Tradition which we have always desired.