Women Priests In Italy, Women Bishops In England

The BBC can dream on that anyone in Italy will so much as notice the “ordination” of a woman by the tiny Old Catholic body in that country. There are not even very many Old Catholics in Germany, Switzerland or the Netherlands. There are practically none in Italy. All of their bishops in any country are now former Catholic priests. They have even had to borrow an Anglican church for expats in Rome for this occasion.

An occasion which does not exactly stand up well against the Declaration of Utrecht, any more than does anything else about Old Catholicism in practice. Whether apart from Rome or in internal dissent from Rome, High Church movements have always become progressively less orthodox theologically, and thus (among much else) progressively less radical politically. Meanwhile, ultra-Augustinianism produced the Remonstrandt Brotherhood, the Socinian ‘New Licht’ within the Free Church of Scotland, the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, and Unitarianism among English Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists. Look at the once-Gallican, once-Jansenist Old Catholics.

Meanwhile, the news has slipped out, barely noticed in the Election furore, that the Church of England really is to proceed to women bishops. Such attention that there has been, has concentrated on the lack of provision for High Churchmen apart from Rome, and for ultra-Augustinians, some of whom are the same people. But classical Christianity is the basis of this state and the foundation of all three of its political traditions. And independent research has found very large proportions of the women among the Church of England’s clergy to be doubters of or disbelievers in absolutely key points of doctrine, with two thirds denying “that Jesus Christ was born of a Virgin”, and, astonishingly, fully one quarter denying the existence “of God the Father Who created the world”.

The radical feminist Establishment not only wants women to become bishops, but also wants to require the episcopal “team” in each diocese to include both sexes. So, of those with privileged access to the media and other organs of national life as the voice of the Christianity professed by seventy-two per cent of Britons at the last census, at least one eighth will be agnostics or atheists.

Furthermore, a positive decision to retain declared “Fathers in God” within our parliamentary system and wider national life would emphasise the importance of fatherhood. This would set the tone for the introduction of a legal presumption of equal parenting. For the restoration of the tax allowance for fathers for so long as Child Benefit is being paid to mothers. For the restoration of the requirement that providers of fertility treatment take account of the child’s need for a father, and the repeal of the ludicrous provision for two women to be listed as the parents on a birth certificate, although even that is excelled by the provision for two men to be so listed. And for paternity leave to be made available at any time until the child is 18 or leaves school.

That last, in particular, would reassert paternal authority, and thus require paternal responsibility, at key points in childhood and adolescence. That authority and responsibility require an economic basis such as only the State can ever guarantee, and such as only the State can very often deliver. And that basis is high-wage, high-skilled, high-status employment.

All aspects of public policy must take account of this urgent social and cultural need. Not least, that includes energy policy: the energy sources to be preferred by the State are those providing the high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs that secure the economic basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community. So, nuclear power. And coal, not dole.

To argue for this by word and by sheer presence is a role for living icons of God the Father, addressed as “Fathers in God”. Not “Mothers in God” embodying the theory of Mother Gaia, though possibly not believing even in Her. It is most sad that the Holy Father, who fulfils globally that role of such importance both in the family and in the nation, and whose lack of any competitor for that global role is itself such an important Catholic apologetic argument, has somehow been made a pawn of those who wish to banish that role as much from our national life as from our domestic and local life.

Parliament must do its duty and reassert the importance of fatherhood by rejecting any provision for women bishops. No matter what.