They'll Cope

Women bishops will not affect the relations between their male colleagues and their Catholic counterparts, because nothing to do with those relations ever had anything to do with Theology.

The whole thing was and is about class. Specifically, it was and is about a certain working-class fascination with posh people.

But the single biggest source of Catholic priests is probably now the University of Oxford, and virtually everyone entering a seminary these days has been to university, usually from a broadly to thoroughly bourgeois home.

More generally, that kind of working-class person barely exists anymore. That is just not where either the Church or the country is now going.

In the meantime, though, the more than convivial rounds of golf will continue uninterrupted. And what is wrong with that?

As for joining the Ordinariate, as many people have done that as ever will, including at least one cleric in a civil partnership. And he was the least of our worries. We tried to warn you. We did. We tried to warn you.

There is simply not very much opposition to the ordination of women in the Church of England, and most of what there is, is Conservative Evangelical.

People trapped in the world of T S Eliot and John Betjeman need to snap out of it. People trapped in certain, shall we say, all-male circles in London, at Oxford and on the South Coast need to do rather more than that.