Women Bishops

The Church of England’s admission of women to its episcopate would be catastrophic for witness within our national life to the classical Christianity that is, as much as anything else, the basis of all three political traditions. 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 that the episcopal “team” in each diocese 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.

There is a most urgent need for parliamentarians who will uphold Parliament’s constitutional duty to preserve the Church of England’s witness to historic, classical, mainstream Christianity, by neither speaking nor voting in favour of any ecclesiastical legislation not supported both by the Catholic Church and by the Evangelical Alliance.

And there is a most urgent need for parliamentarians who will uphold the Church of England’s place at the heart of the Anglican Communion, a body embracing huge numbers of Commonwealth citizens, of English-speaking people, and of British-descended people, and binding them and others, through the Church of England, to the Crown in Parliament.

On either of these counts, women bishops are unconscionable.

Meanwhile, this week’s goings on at York raise very serious questions about how far the Church of England is still an Anglican body at all. Every bishop who proposed anything, even the Bishop of Durham’s modest suggestion as the evening wore on that they might all reconvene after a good night’s sleep, was voted down, apparently on principle in order to put the bishops, as such, in their place. They are now simple carriers out of the factional activists’ will, with no right to suggest anything, not even a bit of shut-eye.

The liberal wing seems to have been taken over by people much like the Trotskyist infiltrators in the Labour Party years ago. Away from the Synod floor, their behaviour towards those who disagreed with them more than confirmed this comparison.

But considering the information that has already reached this left-footed convalescent in the sticks (diocesan bishops in direct talks with Vatican officials at the very highest levels, others threatening not to retire at 70 and then to fight under age discrimination legislation any attempt to make them go, six hundred incumbents threatening to resign and then sue for constructive dismissal, and much else besides), this one is going to run, and run, and run.