Today, VIT posted a note on her Facebook status expressing dismay at the Statement by the Bishops of Ebbsfleet & Richborough on the Apostolic Constitution on a Personal Ordinariate for former Anglicans. This, of course, is about 
Women Bishops and the battle royal that appears to be raging in the Church of England over whether or not women should become bishops and what should happen to the men (and it is mostly men) who disagree with this move.
Bishops are essentially the Regional General Managers of the Church of England. They meet together as the “House of Bishops” – one of the few remaining all boys clubs still in existence. At present, the majority of the church agrees that women should be allowed to be Regional General Managers. In fact the church’s General Synod has voted consistently on both theological and practical grounds to allow women to be Regional General Managers. However a small vocal minority (in fact divided into two smaller minorities who hold the same view but for entirely different reasons) disagree. The church is doing its best to come up with a compromise. The last time it did this over women priests it got an expensive mess where women were discriminated against, the dissenters got a pay off and the in-betweens who stayed got their own Regional General Managers – or Flying Bishops.
I can’t help thinking this attempt to compromise over Bishops is doomed to failure. Most people think women should be Regional General Managers, rather fewer don’t. Those who don’t are threatening to leave if those who do decide to go ahead. This is where the problem gets more complicated because the question is where would the leavers go to. Until this week it was pretty unclear, but it appears that the said Bishops of Ebbsfleet and Richborough have been freelancing in Rome, trying to undo a few hundred years of history. The results of the freelancing appears to be open arms from the Pope to all would-be defectors. Not just clergy, but possibly even whole parishes who have been consistently taught by their priests and Flying Bishops that the world will end and their communion won’t be proper if it’s been tainted by a woman.
Bringing this firmly back home, my other half is, as you know, a VIT, and female one at that. At present she is training for what must be the only job in the land where the ceiling for women is not glass, but made of purple cloth and is at present entirely impenetrable. There is a point beyond which, at present, she may not proceed. Others, on the same training course, with more or less qualifications, will be able to be promoted, simply because there was more testosterone in their mother’s wombs and they ended up with a penis. (What would the church do with a transsexual bloke I wonder – could he be a Bishop?)
How can we invite people to join our church when they see women who are Prime Ministers, frontline fighter pilots, leaders of multi-billion-pound organisations, headteachers, chief executives of charities – you name it. Women can do anything except this. How can we answer the question “why have you joined this institutionally sexist organisation?”
The answer, of course is simple. Ordain women as bishops and the problem is solved. But what about the dissenters? Well, organisations change. Anyone who’s worked in the public or private sector any length of time knows this. In the NHS people’s jobs have changed over and over again; the NHS looks nothing like the organisation they joined 20 years ago. I think one of the problems is that the church is too ready to ordain people who have had no secular experience. They have nothing against which to calibrate “normal behaviour.” They join the church and think it will never change. God will never change, but the frail expression of his love outworked in the church is only as good as the sinners inside it.
I do feel genuine sympathy for those whose ethics, morals, philosophy or other convictions are hugely challenged by the idea of ordaining women as bishops. It’s a horrible thing to find that an organisation you joined has changed to the point where you know longer feel comfortable. I know – I’ve been there. The answer is simple: you put up and shut up, or you leave. Quietly. Without fuss. Without trying to take your whole department (or parish and school) with you, or trying to create a department within a department where only your rules apply and some other staff and customers are only allowed on certain conditions.. You take your skills elsewhere, wherever they are valued. That way you retain your dignity and everyone’s respect and affection. You don’t try to bring down the very organisation to which you’ve given many years of dedicated service.
Maybe the two Flying Bishops have done us all a service by asking the Pope to make it easier for those who can’t stay to move with dignity. But my earlier observation still remains: do it quietly, not in public.
The shortest verse in the Bible, supposedly is: Jesus wept. I fear he’s weeping now.
P.S. My dictating software transcribed Ebbsfleet and Richborough as “a bus fleet and rich brown” which I rather liked.
I know what you mean about secular gender roles, but Synod has said “yes” countless times, so it’s following that element of discernment too.
Adrian
I like your ‘Regional General Managers’ analogy, Adrian, but I think it serves more to mask the underlying issues than to address them — in another context, I wonder if you’d want to say there was rather more to being a bishop than this?
I like the cloth ceiling image as well, and I can just imagine a sonorous voice intoning, “You are now entering the Circle of Purple Worsted…” (or of course not entering, as the case may be). And yet, looking at the whole thing as if it were simply about career opportunities for church professionals is surely a bit of a caricature, as well. At least, I hope it is.
There’s an unspoken assumption in your piece, too, that the secular consensus on gender roles is the right thing for the church to follow. Now, it may be, but I don’t think that ought simply to be taken as read, as if an obvious and compelling demonstration of the essential godliness of the secular take on this were common knowledge.
(Oh, and on a purely anorak level, you always knew there was a bit more to biological maleness than in utero testosterone levels…)
As a relative outsider looking in on this, I guess the Rich Brown Bus Fleet’s statement must be remarkable for what it doesn’t say, rather than for what it does. The C of E does ‘emollient’ supremely well!
Overall, I’m left with the thought that, to the extent that this Apostolic Constitution business represents a sad refusal to acknowledge a case carefully, gently and persuasively made, it’s a shame. To the extent that it represents an internal political victory upstaged by a flashier piece of showmanship, on the other hand, I think it’s just hard chips.
Two further thoughts: it may be that the effect on RC institutions will be at least as important as that on the C of E, in the long run. And, I wonder if this will end up having any effect on the country’s constitutional arrangements?