Church of England Synod Votes No To Women Priests
Episcopal News Service. November 16, 1978 [78327]
LONDON, England -- Clergy members of the Church of England's General Synod made certain in a vote on November 8, that women will not be ordained to the priesthood in the mother church of Anglicanism for some time to come.
A resolution calling for "legislation to remove the barriers to the ordination of women to the priesthood and their consecration to the episcopate" was resoundingly defeated in the House of Clergy, while the bishops overwhelmingly approved it and the laity endorsed it by a small majority.
The total number of members present and voting was 521 of whom only three abstained. The vote, which came after nearly six and a half hours of mostly calm debate, was: House of Bishops 32 to 17 in favor; House of Laity 120 to 106 for; and the House of Clergy 149 to 94 against. On such an issue, the approval of all three houses is required for adoption.
By its vote the General Synod decided not to carry through a decision in principle it made three years ago to allow women to become priests and bishops. It was generally agreed that the 1978 vote means that women will be excluded from these two orders for at least 10 years.
Just before the vote was taken, Canon W. A. Batty, chairman of the debate, asked that members of the Synod reflect in silence for two minutes, which was done. Then, just before he announced the results of the voting, he. suggested that the news be received in silence. The calm was shattered when Dr. Una Kroll, a long-time advocate of women's ordination, shouted from the public gallery, "We asked for bread and you gave us a stone. Long live God."
In moving the resolution, Bishop Hugh Montefiore of Birmingham appealed for "mutual forbearance, charity and self-restraint" on both sides.
He said that for the Church to insist on an all-male priesthood in a society which had abandoned all-male leadership in other areas of life was to distort the meaning of Christian priesthood.
"If it is to be Catholic in the real sense of that word, we need both men and women. If we do not extend the historic ministry of the Church in response to these major changes in the ordering of our society, we endanger the Church's mission to the world."
He pointed out that some bishops from the U.S. Episcopal Church had said at the Lambeth Conference last summer that the schism in that Church was only partly about women's ordination to the priesthood and that it involved only a small segment of that Church. They said, he reported, that if women had not been ordained priests, there would have been a far greater schism.
Bishop Montefiore said that the Church of England should permit" a pluralism of practice" as in the case of the early Church. He urged members of the Synod not to "quench the Holy Spirit of God -- don't shut the door."
Leading the opposition to the motion was Bishop Graham Leonard of Truro who said that while it was unthinkable to attribute gender to God, it was evident that God had created a world of which sexuality was an integral part, and in the revelation of himself he made use of the distin"I believe that the scriptures speak of God as Father," the bishop said, "that Christ was incarnate as a male, that he chose men to be his apostles in spite of breaking with tradition in his dealings with women, not because of social conditioning, but because in the order of creation headship and authority is symbolically and fundamentally associated with maleness."ction between the sexes.
He concluded that for a woman to represent the headship of Christ would be to tempt people into supposing that they could take the initiative in their dealings with God.
Bishop Gerald Ellison of London said that he had changed his mind in recent years and that he now felt women's ordination should not be approved.
"I have reached the conclusion," he said, "that to decide now to proceed to the ordination of women would create more dissension and wound the Church more deeply than if we were to postpone a decision.... I believe that we need more time for prayer and consultation and more time for education. It would, I believe, be unwise to proceed now."
Dr. Donald Coggan, Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking for the ordination of women to the priesthood, said, "One note I hope we won't hear is that of women's lib or women's rights. " He said that ordination is not a question of rights, that no one has the right to be ordained. "It is solely to do with the sovereign grace of God, who calls and then enables."
Mrs. Jean Mayland of Sheffield delivered a speech which drew cheers, jeers, applause and counter-demonstrations.
She said that she and many others have not started organizations and staged demonstrations in support of women's ordination but they were concerned.
She said, "We may not threaten to leave the Church of England if she does not ordain women -- we love her too much for that. But we do care deeply, passionately, intensely, and we shall not cease to work and to pray until the Church of England takes this step which we believe will be to the glory of God and for the good of his Church.
"Don't be misguided," she warned the members of the Synod, "into thinking that a negative vote today will preserve peace and drive the problem away forever. It will not."
In the U. S. Episcopal Church, Bishop Stanley Atkins of Eau Claire, Chairman of the Evangelical and Catholic Mission, an organization which opposes women priests but has no plan to leave the Episcopal Church, said that his group "gives thanks to God that the Church of England, the senior Church of the Anglican Communion, has refused to take any rash or hasty step" in this matter.
"In the spirit of Lambeth 1978," Bishop Atkins said, "the Evangelical and Catholic Mission believes that this question must be solved only in consultation with the other Catholic bodies, especially Rome and Orthodoxy."