WATCH Out?

This is a new one, heard in recent days. The liberal wing of the Church of England, and especially its old guard feminist tendency such as the campaigning organisation WATCH (Women And The Church), is now threatening to secede if there is any provision for opponents of women bishops, the most obvious such provision being no women bishops at all.

Does anyone believe them? In the best part of 20 years, Forward in Faith has neither crossed the Tiber en bloc nor set up on its own, while Reform has never become, as it could perfectly easily afford to, the core of a new network of Conservative Evangelical congregations. The threats are made repeatedly, even routinely. But they are never backed up or followed through. (Both of the homosexually inclined bishops appointed in George Carey's time came from the Forward in Faith constituency, and one of them is still in office while still living with his very long-term male partner. If there is ever an Ordinariate in England, a country for which that provision was not designed, then I would not be surprised to see its members drawn largely or entirely from elsewhere.)

However, I think that there might be something in the liberal and feminist one. They are far more used to their own way, making them far more likely to strop off if they don't get it. Notice that they are not only threatening to leave if they are denied women bishops, but even if anyone else is given any ground in the legislation making that change possible.

Coming over to Rome is a big step in all sorts of ways, while even a constituency as wealthy as the Reform one would be taking something of a leap in the dark by going it alone. Whereas the world of WATCH, Affirming Catholicism, the Modern Churchpeople's Union, the Lesbian & Gay Christian Movement, the Open Synod Group, and all that, corresponds very closely to the now almost completely convergent mainstreams of the Methodist Church of Great Britain and the United Reformed Church, presumably neither of which, deriving as they do from men originally ordained in the Church of England, would require reordination or anything of that nature. And the people running those bodies would welcome any injection of voting power to be used against their existing Evangelical or, in their own terms and especially in the Methodist case, traditionalist elements.

No one in Aff Cath would have doubts about those bodies, either; on a very good day, the Affirmers might even refer to the conferral of sacramental Ordination by certain abbots, including one in England, to whom Medieval Popes had granted that privilege, which the four Cistercian Proto-Abbots were exercising without hindrance in respect of the Diaconate into the seventeenth century. Of course, they would simply ignore the need for a special exercise of the Papal power for the valid exercise of this potestas ligata contained, like that to confirm, in the priestly power of consecration. If, that is, any such potestas ligata exists at all.

This really could be, as I nearly entitled this post, one to WATCH.