ACCEPTING the settlements that enabled the ordination of girls to the priesthood and episcopate was an “error of judgment”, the Bishop of Dover, the Rt Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin, said on Saturday.
Addressing the Not Equal Yet Conference organised by Women and the Church (WATCH) at St John’s, Waterloo, the Bishop, who, because the Bishop in Canterbury, is accountable for the day-to-day running and leadership of the diocese, was critical of the availability of episcopal ministry and the working of the Five Guiding Principles that accompanied the women-bishops laws (News, 16 July 2021).
“I could be the just one here, but I’m not afraid to say that I feel it was an error of judgement that led us to simply accept the blinkered and restrained conditions of girls being priested,” she said. “I actually genuinely imagine that.”
In her remarks, Bishop Hudson-Wilkin recalled Mary’s assent within the Gospels, and wondered what the story would have been “if Mary had turned around and said: ‘I cannot possibly comply with this since the Pharisees and the Scribes’ — in effect the teachers of the law — ‘must be those to say its’ OK first.’”
She went on to use this formula to the query of girls’s ordination: “‘I cannot possible comply with this unless Rome says it’s OK . . .,’ ‘Unless the Orthodox does it first.’ I believe Simeon and Anna would still be within the temple waiting for the prophecy to be fulfilled.”
Such a response was “heavily disguised as a priority for Christian unity”, she said. “And that concerns me because I need unity also.
“But perhaps it tells us something of our insecurity in who we predict we’re as a Church. I don’t imagine for one moment that Rome, or the Orthodox, full of the conviction of the Spirit on any essential matter equivalent to this, would say: ‘We can’t do that unless the Anglicans or the Orthodox are doing it.’ Or even play the unity card.”
She read aloud from Maya Angelou’s poem, “Caged Bird”. “This poem aptly captures among the experiences of girls in our Church today with our wings clipped and our feet tied to structures and procedures which are in effect unequal and un-Anglican,” she said. “An example of this being the bishop not being a spotlight of unity for the entire Church. Because if we don’t agree with a selected direction, we ask for our own personalised bishop who we will relate to.
“Where will this stop? I grew up in a Church that said it didn’t matter who the priest was, or what the priest did: it had no impact on the sacrament. And suddenly it’s a women, and it matters. ‘We couldn’t possibly have a girl on the altar.’
“What happened to that teaching that said it didn’t matter? Thrown out the window.”
She also read aloud the primary of the Five Guiding Principles, a part of the House of Bishops’ Declaration that accompanied the laws enabling the admission of girls to the episcopate.
The first principle states that “the Church of England is fully and unequivocally committed to all orders of ministry being open equally to all, regardless of gender, and holds that those whom it has duly ordained and appointed to office are true and lawful holders of the office which they occupy and thus deserve due respect and canonical obedience.”
Bishop Hudson-Wilkin asked: “Can we actually genuinely say this, when embedded inside our very structures we embrace a conflicted General Synod that behaves like whipped political-party members able to jump within the direction of their ideological masters in the shape of their party groups? . . . When we elect CNCs [the Crown Nomination Commission, which nominates bishops] who’re diametrically against women in leadership? . . .When we financially support theological colleges that teach the precise opposite? Let’s get up!”
She recalled that when her appointment as Bishop was announced, a recently ordained curate within the diocese had “downed tools and refused to work”. It was, she said, “immoral [for him] to proceed to receive his stipend while not working”. He had been allowed to maneuver to a different diocese.
She didn’t wish to carry on to “the righteous rage that I feel sometimes”, she said. “But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage. It is debilitating to carry on to our rage, because our souls must sing of freedom, which comes from walking the best way of Christ.”
She was “saddened” by an issue from the audience which noted that the Julian Shrine in Norwich was within the parish of St John the Baptist, Timberhill, which was a conventional Catholic parish. “Gather as a bunch of girls and go there and be there and sit there and stand there, since it shouldn’t be,” she said. “Don’t take it lying down.”
Bishop Hudson-Wilkin was asked why “some women feel so passionate that relating well with their colleagues who don’t imagine of their priestly calling is a greater good than calling for change”.
She replied that there was “something occurring when women consciously and unconsciously are being made to feel or to think that they should shrink, that they should not shine, in order that others can. And actually I feel we’d like to shine together and be much bolder . . .
“We have been walking around on [an] eggshell. . . We are tiptoeing along on it. Let’s stop tiptoeing on it. Let’s be honest, lovingly.”
She told the audience that she had “no intention” of going to the “alternative” chrism mass in her diocese, quoting Jesus’s instruction to “shake the dust out of your feet”. “Why would I need to go to a spot to be humiliated?”
The conference’s stated aim was to “break the present taboo within the Church of England about continuing discrimination against women and to begin some conversations about whether it’s now time to begin treating ladies and men equally”.
The chair of WATCH, the Vicar of St Michael’s, Chiswick, the Revd Martine Oborne, thanked Bishop Hudson-Wilkin for “saying things that we sometimes feel are unsayable”.
During a debate on same-sex blessings within the General Synod last yr, Bishop Hudson-Wilkin said: “the women-bishops thing ain’t working — and we’re paying the value” (News, 14 July 2023).
Among the opposite speakers on the conference was the Revd Dr Mark Chapman, Vice-Principal of Ripon College, Cuddesdon, and Professor of the History of Modern Theology on the University of Oxford. He described the Five Guiding Principles as “completely incoherent” and “theological nonsense”.
As a Synod member, he had voted for them because they “codified the mess that was already there”, he said. The “real damage” had been done in 1993 when “a structural solution urged on by an overactive Parliament, chiefly to appease frightened bishops, was created by an Act of Synod, and the Five Guiding Principles suggest that that’s now here to remain.”
The Act of Synod had “effectively destroyed the sacramental unity of the Church”. But it was not ecclesiastical law, he said. The “flying bishops” were simply suffragan bishops, and “may very well be withdrawn overnight”.
On Wednesday, the director of Forward in Faith, Tom Middleton, said: “The Church of England rightly expects clergy who hold different views on the sacrament of Holy Orders to act with charity and generosity on this issue, in keeping with its Five Guiding Principles.
“Calling for an end to the 2014 settlement a mere ten years after its introduction would seem to fall outside that expectation. The Catholic movement upholds the sacramental witness of the universal Church and, in so doing, calls the Church of England back to its origins.”
