Delicta Graviora

No, of course the Vatican's latest canonical prohibition on participation in pseudo-ordinations of women is not aimed at the Church of England. For heaven's sake, get over yourselves. Who do you think you are?

But note that, unlike ten or even five years ago, no one any longer makes the absurd suggestion to potential Anglican converts to Catholicism over this issue that "Rome may change". Everyone now accepts that that is not going to happen. "My RC friends are all in favour of it", one used to hear, though less so now. Who asked them? No one. Nor will anyone ever be asking them. That is just not how it works.

Instead, there is talk that such old 68ers as have not already either left the Church (or as good as) or at least more-or-less returned to orthodoxy might swim the Tiber in the other direction. I hope that they can put up with all the tasteful music and attractive architecture.

In fact, I laughed out loud at last week's Church Times, a souvenir edition for this year's Petertide ordinations. The front page showed albed ordinands prostrate on a cathedral floor, with a man in a chasuble standing over them. Inside, there were gold chasubles and matching mitres all over the place, and women even more than men were clad in single-breasted Roman cassocks, although I cannot imagine who makes them with the buttons up the other side.

What does any of this indicate? Self-definition against the Evangelical wing, because self-definition against its stand on sexual morality. But liberal Catholics would hate it all, not having been formed by the definition of Catholicism simply as these things, so that as long as they are present, then nothing else matters. A lot - not all, but a lot - of the opposition to women's ordination is in this same vein: the all-male presbyterate is a subcultural marker, and if you have it and all the others, then you can be or do anything else you like.

The latest edition of New Directions, the Forward in Faith magazine, contains an article advocating accession to the Western Rite within ROCOR, and seems to suggest that, even among the Orthodox, only that body of émigré Russian monarchists, with all that that entails, is conservative enough to be "safe" long into the future. Well, I hope that Anglicans joining that because they balk about Roman ordination enjoy being unconditionally rebaptised. Unreconstructed Cyprianic ecclesiology. None of your woolly liberal Augustinianism. In fact, no Augustinianism at all. Do potential converts to Orthodoxy understand that?

But the idea of any of the Orthodox ever ordaining women, or marrying same-sex couples, or whatever, is as preposterous as the idea of the Catholic Church's ever doing so. Or, to put it the other way, the idea of the Catholic Church's ever ordaining women, or marrying same-sex couples, or whatever, as is preposterous as the idea of any of the Orthodox ever doing so. Including ROCOR.