Our established church has just received a coup de grâce, which could be loosely translated in this context as a blow delivered by Her Grace Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London.
At least, that’s what she had been until yesterday. Now she has been consecrated to the highest clerical post in the Anglican Church, she is the Most Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury.
Or scratch that ‘Lord’ business. As a self-described feminist, Dame Sarah will doubtless insist on being called ‘Lady Archbishop’. And since she sits in the House of Lords, that chamber should drop its misogynistic, transphobic name and call itself the House of Lords, Ladies and Others.
I’m not sure Dame Sarah will insist on making such changes, but I do know they would be close to her heart. She is also described as a ‘theological liberal’, which, again contextually, means theologically illiterate and aggressively antagonistic to church tradition.
Dame Sarah claims to respect those who are less theologically liberal than she is, specifically on the subject of female ordination, but her “belief is that Church diversity… should flourish and grow; everybody should be able to find a spiritual home.”
You could see me genuflecting even as we speak. Yet no one disputes that “everybody should be able to find a spiritual home”. However, for some that home is at the altar and for others it’s in the pews, and for over 2,000 years women resided in the latter.
And of course she finds nothing wrong with blessing homomarriage. “We can offer a response that is about it being inclusive love.” Dame Sarah has missed her true calling, She’d be perfect running a DEI department at some corporation.
The Church, she adds, “reflects the God of love, who loves everybody.” True.
God does love everybody. But He doesn’t love everything, which even cursory familiarity with Scripture would establish. In fact, He positively loathes those little transgressions He calls sins. If Dame Sarah is unsure whether that rubric covers sexual perversions, she should read Leviticus or, in the second half of the Bible, Romans and Corinthians.
The new Archbishop can be equally woolly on a whole range of subjects. Such as abortion, which is abhorrent to any Christian, and has been for the same 2,000 years. But it’s not abhorrent to the Most Reverend Lady. Neither, by the looks of it, is talking gibberish:
“I would suspect that I would describe my approach to this issue as pro-choice rather than pro-life although if it were a continuum I would be somewhere along it moving towards pro-life when it relates to my choice and then enabling choice when it related to others.”
One can never be sure what this lot mean, but it sounds as if she finds no theological objections to abortion. She herself would rather not scrape a foetus out of her womb, but she has no problem when other women do that if they so choose. Considering Dame Sarah’s age, her personal pro-life preference doesn’t amount to a meaningful commitment.
I could go over Dame Sarah’s views one by one, but there is no need. Just name a woke abomination, and she’ll support it. Deportation of illegal immigrants, for example? You know exactly where she stands. The Tory government’s Rwanda policy should, to her, “shame us as a nation”.
Do you ever wonder why just about every woman ordained or especially consecrated in the Anglican Church is a raving leftie? Many of their male counterparts are too, but a sizeable minority remain conservative politically, socially and certainly theologically.
The minority of such fossils among the female clergy isn’t sizeable. It’s infinitesimal to the point of being non-existent, and I have a ready explanation for this tendency.
Any woman seeking ordination invokes a purely secular fad, and a perverse one to boot, defying scriptural authority and church tradition. Both have chiselled in stone the rule that apostolic ministry is the business of men.
Contrary to what hysterical advocates of female priesthood claim, this doesn’t mean women should play no role in church life. No Christian would ever suggest anything like that – the examples of hundreds of great woman saints, starting with the Mother of God, speak for themselves.
It was women who, when the male disciples cowered out of sight, had the courage to witness the Crucifixion; women who attended Christ’s burial; women who found his tomb empty – women who kept the Christian tradition alive by running convents, monasteries, schools; women who inspired the Crusades; women who were martyred for Christian proselytism.
Women’s contribution to Christianity is equal to men’s, but that doesn’t mean women should be priests. Any woman who insists she has a right to ministry has little knowledge of Christian tradition and no respect for it. What she does respect and enforce is woke diktats, in this case feminism.
And any woke person is ipso facto wicked, which failing has to reveal itself in any activity such a person undertakes. This is my a priori conviction, and Dame Sarah has done nothing to disprove it.
Her consecration may be the final blow to finish off the Church of England – at least as the Church of England. While parishes all over Britain are haemorrhaging communicants, various Anglican communities in Africa and Asia are doing well.
Unlike the mother Church, they tend to be conservative, which means properly Christian. This is the only thing any Church should be, the only way it can survive.
I’m not an Anglican myself, but our established Church is an essential part of British polity. Hence what’s happening to Anglicanism has the makings of a constitutional catastrophe, not just an ecclesiastical one. That’s why even those Britons who don’t care about the latter, should care about the plight of the Church of England. And weep.
If God had more liberally dispensed the gift of belief it would never have come to this.