{"id":13157,"date":"2008-07-08T06:43:48","date_gmt":"2008-07-08T13:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2008\/07\/08\/the-bishop-of-dibley.html"},"modified":"2008-07-08T06:43:48","modified_gmt":"2008-07-08T13:43:48","slug":"the_bishop_of_dibley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2008\/07\/08\/the_bishop_of_dibley.html","title":{"rendered":"The Bishop of Dibley?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

While the Episcopal Church has been internally struggling over ordination of gays, our brethren in the Church of England are still fighting the women’s ordination debate. A small but significant breakthrough came about over the weekend as the Church of England synod agreed that women should be allowed<\/a> to become bishops<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That this is actually subject to debate — especially since the CoE allowed women to become priests in 1994 (the Episcopal Church has had women priests since 1976 and women bishops since 1989) — seems unutterably silly to me, but the fact is that many of the folks in the US leading the fight against gay rights in the church have also been those most dead-set against women’s ordination. Three Episcopal dioceses in the US still don’t ordain women to the priesthood, and many conservatives insist on calling the Presiding Bishop in the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, by the title “Mrs.” instead of “Bishop” (or even “Reverend”). Some claim it’s because of her politics, but I suspect that’s a secondary issue.<\/p>\n

So it’s not a surprise that the issue has been beset by controversy in more staid England, and that some 1300 priests have claimed they’ll quit, or hop over to the Catholics, rather than accept women bishops. <\/p>\n

(The primary argument against it — aside from general Biblical injunctions about women keeping in their place, dagnabbit, which even the conservatives don’t choose to proclaim loudly — is that Jesus chose only men as his twelve (closest) apostles. Of course, he also only chose Jews and speakers of Aramaic, but nobody seems to think those should be requirements for some reasons. More technical discussion here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Though the synod voted to accept women bishops in principle, the prediction is we won’t see any for several years. There’s further votes to be taken on processes and procedures surrounding the whole thing, plus coming up with ways to pastorally care for dioceses or parishes within the CoE that don’t want any of those female type bishops taking care of them. That leaves plenty of time for further pontification (so to speak), defection, or attempts to change the rules back.<\/p>\n

Regardless, bravo to the CoE’s General Synod. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(via BD, along with the post title)<\/p>\n

<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While the Episcopal Church has been internally struggling over ordination of gays, our brethren in the Church of England are still fighting the women’s ordination debate. A small but…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion-episcopal-church"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11030,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/04\/21\/maybe_we_can_shift_the_ar.html","url_meta":{"origin":13157,"position":0},"title":"Maybe we can shift the argument back 20 years …","author":"***Dave","date":"Sat 21-Apr-07 9:21am","format":false,"excerpt":"An largely unrecognized aspect to the stresses and fractures within the Episcopal Church and\u00a0Anglican Communion\u00a0is that the most vehement opponents to accepting gays in the rituals and organization of...","rel":"","context":"In "Religion"","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/episc-shield.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":15200,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/07\/14\/episcopalians-take-a-step-forward.html","url_meta":{"origin":13157,"position":1},"title":"Episcopalians take a step forward","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 14-Jul-09 7:58am","format":false,"excerpt":"While it all sounds like a bunch of legislative hoo-hah at a boring church synod, the actions yesterday by the Episcopal Church (TEC) are a big leap forward for it, and perhaps for Christianity as a whole if we serve as an example. 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Geraldine Granger would say about this particular debate ... Eleven years after the Church of England first began ordaining women as priests, its governing...","rel":"","context":"In "Religion"","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9509,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/06\/19\/our_new_presidi.html","url_meta":{"origin":13157,"position":5},"title":"Our new Presiding Bishopess","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 19-Jun-06 10:12pm","format":false,"excerpt":"While much of the focus on the Episcopal Church's triennial General Convention has been on, y'know, the Gay thing, a new curve ball got tossed in by the election, on...","rel":"","context":"In "Religion"","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}