CONFIRMED: JUSTIN WELBY FOR ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY

 

Sources have confirmed that the Eton-educated bishop will be announced as successor to Dr Rowan Williams as early as Friday, after the Crown Nominations Commission put his name forward to Downing Street. 

It marks a meteoric rise for the former oil executive who has been a bishop for only a year, but insiders described Welby as "the outstanding candidate".

The bookies and Ruth Gledhill were right.

Bishop Welby supports women bishops, but so far as I can discern, he probably does not favor either same-sex marriage or gay bishops.

UPDATE FROM THE BBC:

In a pastoral letter to his diocese on the issue he wrote how he was "committed to and believes in the ordination of women as bishops".

He has been less forthright about his views on homosexuality. While he has rigorously defended the Church's right to oppose single-sex marriages, he has also been keen to accommodate opposing views expressed from a position of deeply held faith.

CHURCH OF ENGLAND - NO GAY BISHOPS

From the Church Times:

In England, the equality laws make it unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their sexual orientation...

Nevertheless, exemptions written into the Act accept that the C of E “does not draw the same distinction as most secular employers between a person’s work life and his or her private life”.

The key factor is the requirement of a bishop to act as a focus of unity. The advice states: “Where someone is in a civil partnership and/or is known to have been in a same-sex relationship, even though now celibate, it is for the CNC . . . to come to a view whether the person concerned can act as a focus for unity because of these matters.”

So. The church is exempted from the practice of equality under the law because the bishop must be a focus of unity. That's absurd. No bishop can possibly be a focus of unity for every single person in the diocese. After all, several bishops left the Church of England to join the Roman Catholic ordinariates. They were hardly a focus of unity, because members of their flock stayed behind in the Church of England. The "focus of unity" reasoning appears to be trumped up for the very purpose of excluding gay persons from the episcopacy.

A CHECKLIST has been drawn up that makes it virtually impossible for an openly gay person to become a bishop in the Church of England.

“[F]actors that can properly be taken into account:

• whether the candidate had always complied with the Church’s teachings on same-sex sexual activity;

• whether he was in a civil partnership;

• whether he was in a continuing civil partnership with a person with whom he had had an earlier same-sex relationship;

• whether he had expressed repent­ance for any previous same-sex sexual activity; and

• whether (and to what extent) the appointment of the candidate would cause division and disunity within the diocese in question, the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion.”

The checklist leave me speechless, because it evidences such intrusiveness and discrimination against gay persons as to be truly shocking.

Are you bored yet with posts on the Church of England? I'll give you a rest after this one, unless....