Why Not Now?

by Michael Perry

From Yes To Women Priests

edited by Bishop Hugh Montifiore
Published 1978 by Mayhew-McCrimmon Ltd
in association with A. R. Mowbray & Co. Ltd
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions

‘How long, how long?’ cried St Augustine in the garden, as he was struggling within himself and moving towards the final stage of his conversion, ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now?’

Anglicans who yearn for a decision by their church which will bring women into the priesthood may be forgiven for feeling very like Augustine. The road has been a long one. The Anglican Group for the Ordination of Women to the Historic Ministry of the Church has been campaigning for almost half a century, trying to build up an informed public opinion in favour of the move. It is over thirty-three years since the ordination of Florence Lee Tim Oi in war-time Hong Kong, though that caused so much embarrassment to so many people that she was persuaded to resign her orders after a couple of years.

The Hong Kong affair led the bishops at the 1948 Lambeth Conference to consider the matter. They replied firmly that even to experiment over a limited period ‘would be against [Anglican] tradition and order and would gravely affect the internal and external relations of the Anglican Communion’.

The question, however, refused to go away. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York set up a Commission in 1962 whose report Women and Holy Orders was debated by Church Assembly in 1967. A motion which spoke of there being ‘no conclusive theological reasons why women should not be ordained to the priesthood’ and asked that the subject be further considered, passed the bishops and laity but was defeated in the House of Clergy. A further motion calling for women’s vocations to be tested in the same way as men’s was lost in all three houses, by an aggregate of 207 votes to 60.

In the following year the Lambeth Conference met again. A section report found ‘no conclusive theological reasons for withholding ordination to the priesthood from women as such’, but the full Conference was more guarded and would only grant that ‘the theological arguments as at present presented for and against the ordination of women to the priesthood are inconclusive’ and called for continuing study.

Events gained increasing momentum in the 1970s. Hong Kong again led the way by asking the Anglican Consultative Council what would happen if its bishop went ahead and ordained the two women candidates who were waiting for him to priest them. By 24 votes to 22 the Council said that such action would be acceptable to it and that it would use its good offices to encourage all provinces of the Anglican Communion to remain in communion with a diocese or province which acted in this way.

By 1973 the majority in the ACC had risen to 50 votes to 2 on the question of remaining in communion with a church which ordained women, and 54 to 1 on the view that although ecumenical considerations were important, they should not be decisive.

Discussion had now given place to action. By the end of 1977 women had been ordained priests in Hong Kong, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Episcopal Church of the USA and the Church of the Province of New Zealand. Other Anglican churches agree in principle but are not ready to take action. Amongst them are those in England (by an aggregate vote of 245 to 180 in General Synod on 3 July 1975, though the majority in the House of Clergy, at 110 to 96, was much narrower), Wales, Ireland, Australia, Burma, Kenya and the Indian Ocean. Synods in Central Africa, Singapore and Tanzania have voted against, and bishops and clergy in other provinces have voted to take no decision.

What lessons are there to be learnt from that whirlwind tour of Anglican progress over the last half-century?

1. The movement has undoubtedly gained momentum in the last decade, but we cannot accuse it of indecent haste. As Bishop Kenneth Woollcombe said to General Synod on 3 July 1975,

I pause for a moment to address a word to those who think that we are being pressed to come to a hasty decision. The credal evolution of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit took place between the years 325 and 381, but most of the theological work on the doctrine was done during the last two decades of that half-century. The debate on the ordination of women began just after the First World War, but most of the significant theology has emerged during the last 20 years. The two periods are directly comparable in size and character, and do not support the view that we have been hastier than the Fathers.

2. Theological work has been done, and much of it has been done recently. The Lambeth Fathers may have been right to say in 1968 that ‘the theological arguments as at present presented ... are inconclusive’. By 1975 that last adjective had become out of date and the Synod could rightly recognize that there were ‘no fundamental objections’.

3. Anglican tradition is a developing thing. Lambeth in 1948 could speak of the move as against Anglican tradition, but in 1978 it will have to recognize that it has happened, as part of the developing tradition, in many Anglican churches and provinces. (Compare the way in which Lambeth’s condemnatory attitude towards family planning in 1930 changed to the commendation in 1958 of its responsible exercise.) The declaration which, since 1975, clergy of the Church of England have had to make on ordination and on moving to a new appointment, speaks of doctrine in far less static terms than would have satisfied former generations. The church must carefully, prayerfully and theologically assess what the secular world around is saying to it, because God can use even Cyrus (Isa. 45.1) as an agent of his purpose.

4. There appears to be a tide in the affairs of the Anglican Communion. We have not yet reached a consensus, but the general direction of the tide is incontrovertible. No one should claim any great significance in any single set of voting figures quoted above - in particular, it would be foolish to suggest that a vote of 110 to 96 in the House of Clergy of General Synod on 3 July 1975 showed that ‘the Church of England has decided that there are no fundamental objections to women’s ordination’. But the figures, and the way they change over the years, do suggest a pattern, and it is a pattern of a steadily developing movement in the direction of a much more substantial consensus. That is the way things work in the Anglican Communion. We do not wait for everybody to agree, or expect Lambeth to drill the squads into unanimity. Things take on, gradually - as, for example, revised liturgies are taking on in church after church of the Anglican Communion, not by Lambeth fiat but by local decision.

5. In this process, different parts of the world will move at different speeds, and no church ought to act until there is such a consensus that it would be more offensive to more people to refuse to act than to go forward. It would be folly to force women’s ordination on a church that was not ready for it, and where women were not already being used (as servers, as Readers, as deaconesses, as leaders in the congregation) so extensively that the question of their ordination to the priesthood had begun to press intolerably hard on the consciousness of the church in question. So, by asking for the ordination of women now in the Church of England, we make no judgment on the fullness of the ministry of other churches in other parts of the world or in other centuries than our own. We do not say that the church was deficient in earlier centuries and that only today have we discovered what is necessary to give it the fullness of priesthood.

That would be arrogant indeed. What we do say is that we become deficient in our ministry if we refuse to widen it when the time is acceptable. In a moving situation, we cannot remain faithful by making an unchanging response. What it would have been wrong to do in 1280 it may be wrong not to do in 1980. As far as the Church of England is concerned, we are moving into a very crucial phase. The General Synod vote of 1975 did not reveal a sufficient consensus; the majority was so slender that the Synod was right to wait until the bishops decided the time was ripe to test the temperature of the water once more. By the end of 1978, three-and-a-half years after the former vote, in the light of Anglican developments in the interim, and taking account of what will have been said at the 1978 Lambeth Conference, we shall see how much further we are towards a consensus. Soon - and probably this time - it will be right for the English church to act. But first we must ask, (i) what can we learn from the experience of other parts of the world, and (ii) what are the ecumenical implications?

Women have been ordained elsewhere in the world, and we should learn from the experience of other countries. The State connection of the Church of Sweden (where the first women were ordained in 1960) is so strong that the church was virtually coerced into having women priests as part of the movement towards equality of opportunity for women. The resultant rancour lasted a very long time indeed, and we may be thankful that in England the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 specifically excluded the Churches from its provisions. Theological decisions with pastoral implications cannot be made under duress.

The unhappiness in Sweden was similar to that which is now racking the Episcopal Church in the USA (ECUSA), though in that case the pressure has been from within the church. What seems to happen in a church where the possibility of women’s ordination is raised is that at first the thing is a remote and theoretical possibility, which does not touch many people because there seem to be few women with a claim to such a vocation. As the years go by and the number in favour of the move grows, the theoretical possibility begins to appear practicable and the tension mounts to a critical point. By the time the minority in favour has turned into a majority, it is hard not to be strident or uncharitable— whether one is for or against the proposal. Since the vocation to the priesthood is seen to be conceivable for women, there will be more women who will consider it seriously. More and more priests and bishops will be persuaded that it would be a right move to take, and become more and more unhappy not to be permitted to do what seems right. This is the stage which had been reached in ECUSA by 1974. Some women felt so strongly that they found retired bishops to perform quasi-ordinations without canonical authority. Some bishops declared they would ordain no more men as priests until they were allowed to ordain women as well. On the other side there were priests and laypeople who said that if the Episcopal Church ordained a single woman they could no longer conscientiously remain within its communion.

That was the hurtful situation before the 1976 General Convention of ECUSA. The question would not go away, and there was going to be distress whether the answer was ‘yes’ or ‘no’—and ‘not yet’ would have made for even more intolerable tensions. In the event, as everybody knows, the General Convention said ‘yes’, the uncanonically ordained women’s orders were regularized, and there have been several ordinations of women since.

The majority of congregations in ECUSA appear to be happy with the verdict, and those who would prefer not to have a woman minister realize that the few women who have been ordained will go to other congregations where they are welcome. Women will not be asked to serve where their ministry is unacceptable.

Others deplore the verdict and wish that it had gone the other way, yet wish to remain within ECUSA despite it all. The Presiding Bishop himself is of this opinion

A very small - but vocal - minority has decided that the Episcopal Church is now no longer the church they knew. The ordination of women is for them the last straw. They had expressed disquiet about other tendencies in the church, such as the course of liturgical revision and the liberalizing views towards divorce and homosexuality which appeared to them to be taking a hold in ECUSA. They have therefore split away to form a body known as ‘The Anglican Church in North America’ which they claim is the true and unchanging ECUSA from which the main body has defected. Their first four bishops were consecrated on 28 January 1978, but they could only find two consecrating bishops rather than the normal minimum of three. One was a retired bishop of ECUSA and the other a bishop of the Philippine Independent Catholic Church (a body in full communion with all Anglican churches) who was acting without the knowledge or consent of his Supreme Bishop. It is sad to see those who champion Catholic order departing so quickly into petty sectarianism. The new church has already split in two over the propriety of the consecrations and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Presiding Bishop of ECUSA refuse to recognize either of the two new churches. The dissidents number about ninety congregations - a tiny minority in a church of almost three million members.

The existence of ‘The Episcopal Church in North America’ is to be regretted but its importance in practical terms is minimal, and breakaway groups do not appear to have been formed elsewhere in Anglicanism where women are ordained. The auguries are that when women are ordained in the Church of England there will be a few people who will no longer be able to walk with us. That should not make us insensitive or uncaring, but when the time comes, we shall have reluctantly to say to them that the distress caused by refusal to act will be greater than that caused by acting. I believe that when the time comes, the majority will be in favour of women’s ordination and that most of those who disagree will continue to do so within our communion and fellowship. fellowship.(1)(1)

Anglicanism is the least liable of all the great communions to schism, perhaps because the bounds of her doctrinal comprehensiveness are so widely drawn that it is hard to believe one’s-self outside the pale. The same is true of the Anglican Communion as a body. So far, no church or province has withdrawn from communion with any Anglican church which ordains women, and the 1976 Anglican Consultative Council declared, without dissent, that in this matter ‘the Anglican Communion faces an opportunity ... to give witness to diversity without breaking the bonds of love which bind us in one communion’. Intercommunion does not require prior agreement on every point.

There is one anomaly which has already made for difficulties, and that is that priests are no longer completely mutually interavailable throughout the Anglican Communion. What happens if a woman, validly and canonically ordained within her own province, goes to a province which will not ordain women? May she act as a priest there or not? The Central African Synod and the South Pacific Anglican Council have said that she will not be persona grata there, and the bishops of the Church of England have declared that they may not legally grant permission to any woman, however valid her ordination in her own church, to officiate in the provinces of Canterbury and York. This statement has not been debated in Synod or tested in the courts, and the point is not yet a sufficiently important one for Synod to spend time on it. But if the ordination of women in England is much longer delayed, the anomaly ought to be properly dealt with. It is at present an insult to any Church of the Anglican Communion which has tested the vocation of a woman and canonically ordained her, to say that a priest from that Church is unacceptable here for no other reason than that the Church of England has not yet made up her mind. We should extend to those from other cultures the rights they have in their own church and country as part of the courtesies of hospitality, even if in our own situation we are not able to go as far as they do—especially as our own Synod has declared that there is ‘no fundamental objection’ in principle.(2)

We must now move on to consider the ecumenical implications. The Ten Propositions of the Churches’ Unity Commission (set out in January 1976) ask the English churches to declare their willingness to join in a covenant actively to seek visible unity. Proposition 6 makes it clear that the covenant would include the mutual recognition by all covenanting churches of each other’s ordained ministries as true ministries of word and sacraments in the Holy Catholic Church.

The Baptist, Methodist and United Reformed Churches already ordain women ministers. If the Church of England were to enter the covenant, we would thereby accept them as true ministers of word and sacrament. General Synod will be asked in July 1978 to declare whether the Ten Propositions are a good enough basis for continued negotiations. By mid-February 1978, sixteen diocesan synods had debated the Propositions and fourteen of these had found them acceptable. (Of the remaining two, one had an aggregate vote of 107 to 15 in favour, but the motion failed as the Bishop voted against it.) It would be difficult to accept the propositions and enter into a covenant to recognize Free Church ministries, only to say that their male ministries alone were acceptable. The Church of England’s failure to ordain women is already an obstacle to unity with the Free Churches, and it is not much more than fortuitous that so few of the! officially-recognized Local Ecumenical Projects (formerly Areas of Ecumenical Experiment) have a woman Free Church minister on the staff who celebrates the eucharist for the Anglican members of the joint congregation (the author only knows of two such in the United Kingdom-Redditch and Livingston). ; The Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference on 8 DecemDecemberber 1977 declared that they could not accept Proposition 6 and that they would therefore be unable to enter into the proposed covenant. The Orthodox Church was not represented on the Churches’ Unity Commission, and Archbishop Athenagoras has stated that the propositions ‘cannot possibly be accepted. They cannot even be discussed by the Orthodox Church in England’. The difficulties felt by these two churches go far beyond the matter of women’s ordination, but it is this on which we must concentrate for our present purposes.

The General Synod on 3 July 1975 asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to inform the appropriate authorities in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches of its decision that there were ‘no fundamental objections’ to women’s ordination, and to invite them to share in an urgent re-examination of the theological grounds for including women within the order of priesthood. The Pope replied that this was ‘not admissible ... for very fundamental reasons’ and that if Anglicans were to ordain women, it could not fail to introduce ‘an element of grave difficulty’ into Anglican-Roman dialogue, but that he believed that ‘obstacles do not destroy mutual commitment to a search for reconciliation’.

The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith expanded the Pope’s statement in Inter insigniores, a ‘Declaration on the Question of the Admission of Women to the Ministerial Priesthood’ which it published on 27 January 1977 together with an official commentary. Its tone was intransigent. The church ‘does not consider herself authorized’ to take this move; the question ‘impinges too directly on the nature of the ministerial priesthood for one to agree that it should be resolved within the framework of legitimate pluralism between churches’. The Orthodox reply was even less encouraging. The Archbishop’s letter drew a reply from Archbishop Athenagoras of Thyateira and Great Britain, who made it clear that the Holy Synod would be entirely opposed to a move which stemmed from nothing more than ‘contemporary fashion which overthrows the evangelical order and the experience of the Church’. At the Anglican-Orthodox Commission’s meeting in Moscow in 1976 the Orthodox delegates left on record their belief that women’s ordination ‘will create a very serious obstacle to the development of our relations in the future’.

We must not forget that the Romans are in ecumenical dialogue with the Orthodox, and it may well be that the Pope does not wish to endanger the moves to heal the breach of 1054 by too close a rapprochement towards Protestantism.

To many Anglicans, these reactions of Rome and the Orthodox churches are crucial. By God’s grace, the Church of England maintained through, the Reformation the three-fold Catholic ministry and it would be a tragedy if we were to desert it now by admitting to the priesthood those whom Rome and the Orthodox ‘aver are incapable of receiving the priestly character. Admittedly the Orthodox Church does not recognize our orders, and the Roman Catholic Church in 1896 declared them ‘absolutely null and utterly void’, but we have great hope in the present ecumenical climate that ways will be found of getting round this nineteenth-century intransigence. To move away from Rome would be to destroy all the ecumenical gains so hardly won in recent decades and to remove all hopes of mutual recognition of ministries. So crucial a move as the ordination of women could be made by no authority less than a fully ecumenical council representing both Rome and the Orthodox world, in which the context of decision-making would be the whole of the Christian world and any tendency to Western parochialism could be confined within the insights of churches in very different kinds of societies. Roman and Orthodox, understandings of women (and the high place they give to the Mother of our Lord) ought to counterbalance the strident ‘unisex’ of English and American propaganda According to the Vincentian Canon, what has been believed semper et ubique et ab omnibus cannot be set aside by one national church—and of this there is no clearer example than the maleness of the priesthood. If Anglicans claim a share in the priesthood of the universal church rather than a distinctively and parochially Anglican ministry, they cannot take action unilaterally on so central an issue.

That is a formidable list of objections, but it cannot close the case.

1. The Pope’s letter to Archhishop Coggan, and the declaration Inter insigniores, are weighty documents of an authoritative nature, but they are not infallible. Already Fr John Wijngaards, Vicar General of the Mill: Hill Fathers (in his book Did Christ Rule Out Women Priests?), has questioned both these documents, and does not cut himself off from communion with Rome by so doing. Theologians of the stature of Kung, Rahner, Danielou and O’Collins believe that a woman’s vocation to the priesthood ought to be tested in the same way as a man’s, and the Alliance of St Joan has been working within the Roman Church since 1911 to this end. The Second Vatican Council declared that ‘it is important that [women] participate more widely also in the various sectors of the Church’s apostolate’ and stated that ‘forms of social and cultural discrimination in basic personal rights on the grounds of sex ... must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design. It is regrettable that these basic personal rights are not yet being respected everywhere, as is the case with women who are denied the chance freely to choose a ... state of life’ (The Church in the Modern World, 29). Some Roman Catholics see Inter insigniores as a final authoritative word, but others believe it to be the last despairing fling of the vieux garde of Roman traditionalists trying to do a Canute on the rising tide of the theological conviction that the Lord is calling his church to new adventures in a new age. It is still a quaestio disputata whether the maleness of priests is of the esse of the priesthood or is simply fortuitous, like the celibacy of the priesthood which, though a venerable tradition, could in principle be dispensed with. By joining the ranks of those Anglican churches which already ordain women, the Church of England might strengthen the hands of those Roman theologians and pastors and people who want to persuade their church to do the same.(3) They will have a hard struggle, as the tide in their church has not yet turned. Practically speaking, it is clear from recent events that full communion with Rome would only be possible if Anglicans were prepared to move closer to Rome than the Old Catholics—and that may serve to put the ecumenical argument against ordination of women in its right perspective. Ecumenical conversations will go on, but fresh items must be added to the dialogue.

2. Dialogue with the Orthodox must continue. The Joint Communique of the Oecumenical Patriarch and the Archbishop of Canterbury stated that ‘the Anglican Church was not seeking the agreement of the Orthodox Church on this subject, but was hoping for understanding of it. The two leaders agree that the official dialogue between the Anglicans and Orthodox should continue’. It would be unrealistic to expect the Orthodox to accept even male Anglican orders at present, and the difference of ethos between the two churches is very considerable, as is obvious to the reader of the documents printed in Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue (SPCK, 1977). Tradition, for the Orthodox, is one and indivisible; it can develop, but it cannot contradict or go back on itself. In the continuing dialogue, each church will have to realize that the other holds a different view of how far and in what ways tradition is determinative of the issue. What is right and possible for some Anglican churches now, is clearly inconceivable to the Orthodox. Until they can grant that this is a matter on which autocephalous churches may hold different practices without mutual excommunication, we shall just have to agree to differ.

3. The role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in this matter seems to be a piece of double-think. She is a woman and has a very special place in the scheme of salvation. That her very existence lends an honour to womanhood which could not be enhanced by bestowal of the priesthood on any woman seems by no means to follow from that. Nor does there seem to be any relevance in the fact that she was not a disciple or apostle. To deny the priesthood to a woman on the grounds that our devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary indicates sufficiently the honour paid to her sex as a whole, seems unjust and insensitive to the vocations of many women.

4. By seeking to open the priesthood to women, we do not drop our claim to be part of the universal ministry of the church catholic; we claim to be developing that ministry, under God’s guidance, in new forms for a new age. Inter insigniores admits that ‘we are dealing with a doctrine which classical theology scarcely touched upon’, so the Vincentian Canon is irrelevant. Although the ministry has been confined to males ubique et ab omnibus, the semper part of the Canon only applies up till now, because only now has the time become ripe—and then only in certain societies—to carry out the theological examination.

5. To ask for the matter to be settled by a General Council is to cry for the moon. To be truly ecumenical it would need to include the churches of the Reformation as well as those of Rome and Orthodoxy. That might show up the Eastern parochialism of the Orthodox, who seem incapable of seeing things from a Western viewpoint! There is no practicable hope for an ecumenical council within the forseeable future; when General Councils cannot be called, decisions have to be made at a lower than conciliar level. This is what the Church of Rome has done. Its dogmas (e.g. of infallibility in 1870, or of the Assumption in 1950) have been declared without waiting for the agreement of Canterbury or of Constantinople, let alone of Geneva. The Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Archbishop Scott, has pointed out that, historically speaking, General Councils did not initiate completely new courses of action in the church but confirmed some beliefs and practices which were under way and rejected others. “In the early Church many things were tried in one area and then either approved or rejected for Catholic use. Perhaps, today, we need again to consider this as a valid way of acting.’ Part of the sadness of schism is that in a divided church it may be necessary for a part to do what the whole is not yet prepared to do; but the action of a part may help the rest to come to its later decision more easily.

6. Finally, we as Anglicans must act as it seems theologically proper for us to act, as autocephalous churches, not looking over our shoulder at what would or would not be acceptable to churches with whom we are not yet in communion. If there is to be true ecumenical dialogue, it must be dialogue between churches which act on their convictions, not between churches which repress their convictions for fear of giving offence to each other. We must act in love for our separated brethren, but unless it is the truth as we see it that we speak in love, our love is no more than a sentimental fear of giving offence.

What will happen in the Church of England when we begin to ordain women as priests? I hope that we shall not move until the consensus is strong enough for us to do so in charity and without schism. I believe we are moving towards that time. I echo the words of the Bishop of Massachusetts, preaching on 15 October 1977 at the ordination of Nancy Sargent, when he said, ‘Our task is to remain together as members of his body who belong to one another and who in patience and understanding (or at least attempting to understand) pray for one another, wish one another well in the Spirit and do all we can to support each other in responding to that spirit as we understand God, the Holy Spirit, is calling us. We may have different interpretations but we have one spirit and we belong to one body’

At the beginning I expect to see a few women being ordained—no great rush, no ‘monstrous regiment’, no swamping of the priesthood by too many new recruits at a time. I see many of those whose ministry in a place as deaconess or lay worker or as teacher or as religious has been blessed and appreciated, going forward naturally and with the full backing of those amongst whom they have already been ministering. There are few enough women with vocations yet, and many enough places where they would be welcomed as priests with love and enthusiasm, to make it absolutely sure that no woman will go as a priest unless she is wanted there. We cannot tell precisely what gifts they will add to the priesthood, for we have not yet known them as priests. We do expect the priesthood to be enriched by them. They are not pretending to be men, or doing work which men can do. They are women, bringing their femininity to God within the priesthood and making their gifts available in it to the whole people of God.

As for the practical difficulties about which some people are making heavy weather, they will be solved as we go along—married women and children, ‘difficult days’, premenstrual tension, menopausal hang-ups. These are things the Free Churches with women ministers know about; and they have not found them insuperable.

In the Church of England, we stand in the valley of decision. With women amongst our priests, ‘a great door and effectual’ could be opened to us. If in the months ahead, we can come to a common mind, God will be able to do great things through a widened ministry. Let us not fail him, for now is the appointed time!

(1) In the province of New Zealand there were several threats of secession, if women were ordained, but none had materialized by February 1978. In one diocese the Vicar General, a leading opponent in earlier debates, presented the first women candidates to be ordained! (Editor)

(2) In New Zealand the Bishop of Nelson has refused to authorize women priests to officiate in his diocese, although they have been canonically ordained in his province. This is the kind of stress which the Anglican Communion is already being called—successfully —to bear. (Editor)

(3) See Bishop Baker’s account of the friendly welcome by Roman Catholics in Hong Kong to Anglican women priests

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