Unity at Canterbury

Anglican bishops approve ordination of women

The Anglican Church was once so upper-crusty English that an 18th century wag called it "the Tory Party at prayer." That was before the British Empire carried Anglicanism into the colonial hinterlands, where it sank indigenous roots and waxed while the Empire waned. Today Anglicanism has become a loose "communion" with 65 million adherents belonging to autonomous churches in 165 nations scattered from Canada to Zambia. To be sure, there are still many tea-sipping High Church bishops, but there are as well a few black ones with more than a passing interest in Marxism. And though the "mother" Church of England still claims 30 million adherents in the U.K., only in the Third World is the church actually growing.

Such heterogeneity can make for schism. But Anglicanism has also been described by a Lutheran theologian as "the most elastic church in all of Christendom." Last week the Anglicans acted true to form, weaving a middle way on the vexatious issue of whether women should be ordained as priests. Meeting at their once-a-decade Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, England, bishops from all over the world voted 316 to 37, with 17 abstentions, to let each national church choose whether or not to ordain women priests, as long as dissenting voices are considered before any changes are made. On creating women bishops, Lambeth gave a yellow light: women can be raised to the episcopate only with overwhelming approval of the membership and after consultation with a newly created committee of Anglican archbishops. Said one observer: "The majority surprised everybody. Even Anglo-Catholics voted for it. They wanted to put up a solid front and demonstrate unity."

To many Lambeth conferees, the question was less whether women ought to be made priests than how to preserve unity within the church and ecumenism without. Some diehards held that female Apostles were absent from Scripture and that since priests who administer the Sacrament represent Christ, they should be, like him, male. Objected the Rev. Elizabeth Weisner of Washington, B.C., one of some 150 women who have already been ordained: "A priest is a priest is a priest. The Sacrament is unchanged by the person celebrating it." A bigger stumbling block was opposition from the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, particularly since Anglicans like to consider themselves a kind of ecumenical bridge between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. The greatest obstacle, however, was the real threat of that rarity in Anglicanism--schism. After the Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of Anglicanism, voted narrowly to ordain women priests two years ago, a conservative faction split off in protest and proclaimed itself the true Anglican Church of North America.

The ordination of women has gone more smoothly in Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong than in the U.S. Even the Church of England has announced "no fundamental objections," and the Lambeth decision may help pro-women's ordination forces carry the day at the Church of England Synod this November. As for black African Anglicans, some associate women's equality with racial equality. Others, however, share the position taken by a Kenyan bishop: Women priests are fine for the West, but not for us.

The spirit of harmony at the Lambeth Conference--the eleventh since 1867 --may have been helped by the decision to have the bishops live together in a conclave at the University of Kent as temporary celibates, rather than scatter to London hotels with their wives after the working day. Ironically, while the bishops were contemplating female equality, their wives were cooped up in a sort of enforced purdah in another college three miles away, not able even to telephone except in case of emergency.

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