Such is the overall theme of A.N. Wilson’s article on the appointment of the Right Rev Cherry Vann as the Archbishop of the Anglican Church in Wales.
This epochal development, believes Mr Wilson, sets a fine example the Church of England ought to follow: “As a churchgoer, I do not absolutely insist that the next Archbishop of Canterbury should be a lesbian, though I would much prefer it if she were.”
If I were close to Mr Wilson (whom the late Auberon Waugh used to call ‘Ann Wilson’), I’d be concerned about his mental health. Since I’m not, I’ll simply comment on the arguments he puts forth. The effort is worthwhile because one hears similar nonsense more and more often.
To begin with, you don’t play the game, you don’t make the rules, as Americans say. Since I’m not an Anglican myself, it ill-behoves me to lecture the Anglicans on their criteria for consecrating bishops or ordaining priests.
If they believe that any mammal with a pulse is fit for high ecclesiastical office, who am I to argue? All I can do is bemoan that the established church of my country has evidently gone mad.
Yet Mr Wilson invites not just regret but also argument by stating, correctly, that: “Anglicans have traditionally believed to be part of one holy catholic and apostolic church.”
Now, as far as I’m concerned, the only two apostolic churches are Orthodox and Roman Catholic. Henry VIII’s break with Rome was also a break in the apostolic succession started by the original twelve disciples of Christ.
Though Henry himself didn’t become a Protestant, the English Church did – as a result of his turning his back on the throne of St Peter. It’s true that the High end of the Anglican Church has kept much of the Catholic structure and liturgy, along with pomp and circumstance. But its credal document, the Thirty-Nine Articles, is sheer Calvinism – a confession no one has ever accused of being apostolic.
If you seek tangible proof of the fundamentally Protestant nature of the C of E, then its 1994 decision to ordain women should satisfy your curiosity. My view on the matter is based on theology and church tradition, which I’ll discuss in a moment.
But first let’s see how Mr Wilson frames his opposite argument: “It may well be the case that the majority of Christians in the world – Catholic and Orthodox – are the inheritors of a tradition that is patriarchal if not actually misogynistic; but this is where they are…”.
Mr Wilson magnanimously agrees that the majority of Christians have a right to such obscurantism. But:
“The progressives, however, are also right – so very, very right – to say not only that our perceptions of human character and human sexuality have changed but that a great deal of what was considered morality in the past was not merely wrong, it was a hypocrisy, a denial of what was real.”
And reality is in constant flux, with no absolute, eternal truths anywhere in existence. If ‘progressives’ believe that it’s now perfectly moral for a man who used to be a woman to produce a child by a woman who used to be a man, then the rest of us should grin and bear it. Tempora mutantur, and all that.
As applied to the issue in hand, this means that, since the feminist movement has won its historic battle not just for women’s equality but for their identity with men in every respect, the church should accept that fact and change accordingly.
This means that Mr Wilson’s argument has nothing to do with Scripture, theology or church tradition. It’s wholly secular and relativist. In other words, it draws its intellectual content from the avowed enemies of Christianity who over the past few centuries have succeeded in turning it into nothing but a quaint personal preference.
That sort of thinking is puny even when applied to quotidian life. When applied to church affairs, it’s deranged.
In the same fateful year of 1994, Pope John Paul II settled the issue of female ordination once and for all:
“In order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32), I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgement is to be held definitively by all the Church’s faithful (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis 4).”
Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, added that the ban on female ordination required “definitive assent, since, founded on the written word of God, and from the beginning constantly preserved in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal magisterium”.
The word ‘infallibly’ meant that the 2,000 years’ tradition of ordaining only men was free of error. Putting it simply, apostolic churches don’t ordain women because Jesus didn’t include them in the original twelve apostles charged sacramentally to act not just in Christ’s name, but also in his person.
In his Summa Theologica, St Thomas Aquinas explained what that meant. “Sacramental signs represent what they signify by natural resemblance.” To act in persona Christi, a priest needs to have a natural resemblance to Christ, who was a man.
Jesus conferred that status on his disciples, who then transmitted it through the centuries. This in no way means that Christ or his followers regarded women as in any way inferior. They are fully equal to men, but the role they play in life and the Church is different.
I’d suggest that, at the time of Jesus’s ministry, the women in his entourage weren’t just equal to the men but superior to them. The Virgin, for example, has always been venerated by the Church more than any apostle, and, unlike them, she is regarded as sinless.
When Jesus was crucified, it was women who kept vigil at the foot of the cross, while the men cowered at a distance. Peter, the rock on which the Church was built, betrayed Jesus thrice, and it was a woman to whom Christ first appeared after the Resurrection.
Throughout history, and especially during Christianity’s heyday in the Middle Ages, convents were every bit as vital to the religion as monasteries were. Héloïse was more of a seminal figure than Abelard was, and Hildegard of Bingen stood out among her male contemporaries. The communion of saints includes numerous women – none of whom, however, administered sacraments at the altar.
It’s basic theological ignorance to insist that we must follow the dicta of our times just as Jesus is supposed to have followed his. God is timeless, and his church can’t be a weathervane turning the way the wind blows. It’s a factor of constancy, guardian and transmitter of the eternal truth – or it is nothing.
Mr Wilson doesn’t seem to understand this. Since he claims to be an Anglican churchgoer, he must have noticed the empty pews every Sunday. As a thinking man, he must have wondered why, but the conclusion he has reached is exactly the opposite of the truth. The Anglican Church has become an irrelevance in every other than the purely ceremonial sense not because it doesn’t respond to woke zeitgeist quickly enough – but because it does so with servile alacrity.
The Anglican Church is rapidly turning into an ecclesiastical extension of social services or else organisations like the Women’s Global Empowerment Fund. This renders it superfluous: the cause of wokery is amply served without it.
Notice also that ‘Ann Wilson’ hankers not only after the consecration of female bishops. In the ideal he sees in his mind’s eye, Anglican bishops should be not just women, but specifically lesbians.
“Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, as far as we know,” he writes. This is the line of thought one expects from a sectarian (and theologically ignorant) Protestant, not from a man who believes he worships in a catholic apostolic Church.
Christianity isn’t just the teaching of Christ but also – some will say primarily – the teaching about Christ. Much of this teaching comes from both Testaments, and not necessarily from the words uttered by Jesus. And the Bible contains numerous injunctions against homosexuality: Genesis 19, Leviticus 18 and 20, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians, 1 Timothy, to name a few.
Still, if the Anglicans must have female bishops, they might as well have lesbian ones, especially those who come from ethnic minorities. In for a penny, as the saying goes.