Women bishops are the first big test for Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby

From The Independent-

Temperatures are set to rise in York this weekend, as they are in the rest of the country, but members of the Church of England’s General Synod are unlikely to be getting their kit off. Instead, they will be meeting in their customary buttoned-up manner in the university’s unprepossessing theatre – all clerical collars and geography teachers’ checked sleeveless shirts revealing pale forearms – to argue yet again what to do about these irritating women priests who feel that they may be ready to be bishops. Bewildered, the outside world will stare down at them from the gallery like Yorkshire farmers at a cattle market.

Or perhaps it’s more like a debate in the parliament of Lilliput, the kind of eternal wrangle of a cut-off people, witnessed by the bemused Gulliver, where nothing matters any more other than the internalised priorities of its participants. As writers less original than Jonathan Swift observe, you couldn’t make it up. At last year’s brace of Synods, first the pro-women crowd in July refused to let legislation progress because it made too much provision for those who “in conscience” couldn’t accept their episcopal authority. Then in November, an anti-women ginger group, comprising an uneasy alliance of common conservative evangelicals and posh Anglo-Catholics, holed the proposal below the waterline by six votes in the House of Laity.


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http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/women-bishops-are-the-first-big-test-for-archbishop-of-canterbury-justin-welby-8687746.html