Anglican Synod Votes to Ordain Women Priests

The governing body of the Anglican Church voted by a margin of 3 to 1 Thursday to approve a recommendation to ordain women as priests, a development that some predict could plunge the 1,800-year-old church into its most serious crisis since the Reformation.

The General Synod, composed of more than 500 elected lay and clerical members, voted after a measured but clearly divisive debate to accept a report by church bishops to prepare the legislation necessary to ordain women.

After the vote, church officials stressed that the process of drafting and consulting on synod legislation could take several years and that the first woman Anglican priest would most likely not be ordained before the mid-1990s.

Deep-seated opposition to the move has already divided members of the church and caused senior members, including the influential Bishop of London, Graham Leonard, to threaten a formal split.

Basic Change in Church

“The ordination of women isn’t simply an idea we can think about; it involves a change in the structure of the church,” he argued during Thursday’s debate.

The Church of England already has deaconesses, who are permitted to baptize, conduct marriages and do much of a priest’s work but are forbidden to conduct Holy Communion.

Leonard had threatened to take a minority, estimated by some as large as 20%, out of the church, possibly establishing some form of special link with the Roman Catholic Church.

After the 317-145 vote in favor of ordaining women, Leonard told the British Press Assn. news agency that he was ready to propose talks with the Roman Catholic or Orthodox churches, which do not ordain women, but he appeared to soften previous comments that he was prepared to lead a schism.

Other prominent synod members also voiced vehement opposition to the move.

“I, like so many others, would be forced out of the Church of England,” stated Britain’s minister of state for agriculture, John Gummer, a synod member.

Breakaway Threatened

Another member of Parliament, Peter Bruinvels, spoke emotionally earlier this week of a possible Anglican Church in exile if women--”thirsting for power within the church”--are ordained.

After Thursday’s vote, Bruinvels reaffirmed his threat.

Attempting to ease the tension of the 5 1/2-hour debate that preceded the vote, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert A. K. Runcie, noted that even with synod approval, it would be several years before the first women priests were ordained.

“It’s, therefore, a little early to take the tarpaulin off the lifeboats, or even signaling to other shipping to stand by to take on board some of the passengers,” Runcie said, referring to those who have threatened to leave the church.

Women Priests Elsewhere

Runcie argued that the mother church of the worldwide Anglican Communion is in danger of being left behind by its sister churches in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, Hong Kong and other nations where there are already some 700 women priests.

“If a church listens only to tradition, it will end up only speaking to itself,” Runcie said.

The question of women priests has been a subject of often-heated debate within the Church of England for nearly two decades.

Last year, Runcie and leading bishops defused a potentially volatile meeting on the subject by promising to compile their own report.

It was this report that the synod approved Thursday.

2nd Century Roots

The Church of England, which traces its roots back to the 2nd Century, still considers itself part of the universal Catholic Church, despite its break from Roman papacy during the reign of Henry VIII in the 16th Century and subsequent Protestant reforms.

Many opponents of women in the priesthood fear that the move will isolate the Church of England from the rest of Catholicism.

“It would divide us from the rest of the Catholic Church and would make us a sect,” Gummer stated.

Other opponents charge that the idea of women priests runs counter to accepted doctrine.

“It is a fundamental change and one that assumes the church has been defective for the past 2,000 years,” stated Martin Flatman, a parish priest in Oxford.

Women church members, however, saw things differently, as one nun in Thursday’s debate asked in exasperation: “Am I called to walk tall in society and walk small in the church?”