Jane Kramer's long essay in the
New Yorker, titled "A Canterbury Tale", on the Church of England and its internal battle over women bishops is now available online in its entirety. I read the piece earlier because, although I didn't yet have my copy of the magazine, as a subscriber, I have access to the full contents of the online version of the magazine. I still don't have my copy. The
New Yorker takes forever to get to my house ever since Katrina, and I don't know if it's the magazine or the Postal Service that is responsible for the delay. Back to the article. It's worth a read.
Here's my comment at
The Lead to its first post on the article when only the abstract was available:
Since I don't yet have my copy of the New Yorker, I read the entire article online, and I thought it was excellent. Kramer did her homework before writing. I now understand the Church of England much better than I ever did, and I see how the situation in England drives a good many of the statements of the ABC.
I also understand Rowan Williams a little better after reading Kramer's piece, which does not lead me to further agreement with him. You don't throw certain people under the bus for the sake of saving the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England.
Still, with all Kramer's good work, she doesn't get the difference between the adjective "Episcopal" and the noun "Episcopalian". Why is it so difficult to get that right? Sorry. The mistake grates.
The first words of Kramer's article drew me in like the invitation of a gracious host:
Remember the Church of England, that mythically placid community of Sunday Christians and beaming vicars whom you met in Austen and possibly came to loathe in Trollope?
Moving on, I'll highlight several quotes entice you to read the essay.
It took seventeen years of wrenching Synod debate for women to be ordained, and when they were, some five hundred male priests fled in protest—two-thirds of them, as the saying goes, “to Rome.” The prospect of women’s elevation to the House of Bishops has been even more divisive. This isn’t a question of High Church and Low Church differences. England’s church has always been (the common word) “inclusive.” It grew as an uneasy accommodation between the traditionalists of the Apostolic Creed and Catholic ritual and devotions now known as Anglo-Catholics and the brimstone-and-Bible Protestants born in the chapels of the Reformation, making common cause against the Church of Rome. Today, it covers a sliding scale of beliefs and practices, with the majority of England’s Anglican parishes somewhere in the middle. But the argument about women bishops cuts across all the old divisions. Thousands of conservative Anglicans—priests and laymen—on both sides of the High Church–Low Church divide still refuse to take Communion from a female priest, and would certainly refuse to take it from any priest ordained by a female bishop.
The wenches cause such distress to the advocates of patriarchy in the Church of England, forcing them to make wrenching decisions. How cruel of the wenches!
“How do you eat an elephant?” he [Rowan Williams] said, with something between a chuckle and a sigh, when I asked how he hoped to hold his church together, given that the demands of Anglican women were so completely at odds with the demands of Anglican men whose own inclusion specifically involved excluding those women from episcopal service. “I suppose it’s by using as best I can the existing consultative mechanisms to create a climate—and I think that’s often the best, to create a climate,” he told me. “There’s a phrase which has struck me very much: that you can actually ruin a good cause by pushing it at the wrong moment and not allowing the process of discernment and consent to go on, and that’s part of my view.” He thought that with time, patience, and enough discussion within the Church you could temper the opposition to female bishops—despite the fact that three synods since 1994 have tried to address the issue, and the opposition remains intractable. His friends call this “Rowan’s Obama syndrome”: the persistence of a commendable but not very realistic belief in the power of reason to turn your enemies into allies.
Perhaps if someone walked the ABC through a realistic appraisal of the climate he has created, he'd come to see that his climate plan is not working well, and following "the process of discernment and consent" as he envisages it, women could wait decades for their opportunity to become bishops.
With respect to "Rowan's Obama syndrome", Obama seems to have learned the lesson that his original plan to work with the opposition wasn't working, and he changed his plan. May we hope that the ABC will see that all is not sunny in the climate that he's created and consider a change of plan? I guess not.
The words of a member of the opposition to women bishops in the Church of England:
Geoffrey Kirk, an unabashedly misogynist London vicar who is the national secretary of Forward in Faith, told me that, for him, the tipping point was the Episcopalian bishops’ election of Jefferts Schori as their presiding bishop. He called it “a fundamental scandal” and added, “I think Mrs. Jefferts Schori is a layperson. It’s not my doing. They decided.” He said that a shoplifter was “more qualified, per se,” to be a bishop than a woman was, so long as the shoplifter didn’t say that shoplifting was good, or that he was a Marxist spreading the wealth around.
Does the ABC see any hope of creating an amicable climate between the members of the Church of England who favor the ordination of women as bishops, especially the women in the church, and the likes of Vicar Geoffrey Kirk with his insulting comments? I don't.
Conservative evangelicals—which is to say fundamentalist and, as often as not, charismatic—are one of the only expanding groups in England’s otherwise dwindling church. Vaughan Roberts, the rector of an evangelical church in Oxford called St. Ebbes, told me that his own congregation had spilled over into three other locations, outside the parish structure, in five years and now amounted to nine Sunday congregations, with a total of eleven hundred people.
....
He has been “encouraged” in his mission, he says, by the example of London’s Holy Trinity Brompton, the closest thing to a megachurch in the Church of England. Holy Trinity Brompton was once a tranquil and quite traditional church. Today, as often as not, it is in full charismatic swing. It serves four thousand people, many of them twenty-somethings, at staggered Sunday services, and is said to be the wealthiest parish church in England—even without taking into account the worldwide distribution of its “Alpha Program,” which, like Vaughan’s program, leads you up a smooth path to Jesus, truth, and a cheerful Christian life.
Therein lies a mega-problem for the Archbishop of Canterbury. If enough of the Anglo-Catholics accept Rome's offer to jump the Tiber, then the numbers in the Church of England will weigh heavily on the side of the conservative evangelical, fundamentalist, sometimes charismatic church communities.
There's much more that I'd like to quote, but I've probably gone beyond fair use already. Perhaps the powers at the
New Yorker will not take note of my humble blog. I urge you to take the time to read the essay. I've admired Jane Kramer's previous writing, and my admiration increases with this example of her diligent research and her graceful prose style.
H/T to
The Lead for the link to the entire piece.
