Women in dog collars

Photo: Jane Mingay

How sad that this is what the Anglican church has come to. Dominated by women in dog collars desperate for purple shirts as though they have a God given right to be bishops. Such is the force of their feminist movement in the Anglican church they now dominate debate in England and Wales bringing with it all the equal rights baggage of parity, same sex partnerships and their pension rights.

The latest news from the BBC will give women clergy even more courage to oust all those who oppose their feminist strategies, faithful Anglicans or not, putting all their trust in synodical governance over the faith and tradition of the Universal church using their preposterous claim that their manipulations are the work of the Holy Spirit.

In our Creed we still claim to be members of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church but unilateral decisions of Synod have separated us from the wider church of East and West at a time when great strides are being made towards unity. Putting religious differences aside, this dialogue from "Light of the World" [ISBN 978-1-86082-709-9] on 'Overdue Reforms?' sums-up the position of women's ordination in the Universal Church:

"The impossibility of women's ordination in the Catholic Church has been clearly decided by a "non possumus" of the supreme Magisterium. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith laid this down under Paul VI in the 1976 document Inter insigniores, and John Paul II reinforced it in his 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis. In this document, speaking in virtue of his office about the "divine constitution of the Church", he writes —and these are his exact words—"that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful". Critics see this as a form of discrimination. The only reason Jesus did not call women to be priestesses, it is said, is that this would have been unthinkable two thousand years ago." - Peter Seewald.

"That is nonsense, since the world was full of priestesses at the time. All religions had their priestesses, and the astonishing thing was actually that they were absent from the community of Jesus Christ, a fact that in turn is a point of continuity with the faith of Israel. John Paul II's formulation is very important: The Church has "no authority" to ordain women. The point is not that we are saying that we don't want to, but that we can't. The Lord gave the Church a form with the Twelve and, as their successors, with the bishops and the presbyters, the priests. This form of the Church is not something we ourselves have produced. It is how he constituted the Church. Following this is an act of obedience. This obedience may be arduous in today's situation. But it is important precisely for the Church to show that we are not a regime based on arbitrary rule. We cannot do what we want. Rather, the Lord has a will for us, a will to which we adhere, even though doing so is arduous and difficult in this culture and civilization. Incidentally, women have so many great and meaningful functions in the Church that there can be no question of discrimination. That would be the case if the priesthood were a sort of dominion, whereas it is actually intended to be pure service. If you look at the history of the Church, women—from Mary to Monica and all the way down to Mother Teresa—have so eminent a significance that in many respects they shape the image of the Church more than men do. Just think of major Catholic feast days such as Corpus Christi or Mercy Sunday, which originated with women. In Rome, for example, there is even a Church where not a single man can be seen in any of the altarpieces." - Pope Benedict XVI