V The Seven Devils of Women's Ordination, or, She Who Lie Down With Dogs Catch Fleas

The foregoing does not bode well for women coming into the clerical system. And from what I have seen in America as well as Britain, the women being ordained are becoming even more clericalised than the men, perhaps because they are the new kids on the block and less secure, like any convert, over-zealous and anxious to toe the party line. At the same time, many of them are distinctly uncomfortable, often bearing a deep and undifferentiated unease, a sense that they are betraying something.

How, under these circumstances, women will be able to turn the tide I do not know and I do not think they know, either. Certainly the faces on television in November 1992 were not encouraging, nor have been subsequent encounters with women clergy. [23] And the question has to be asked if they are not wasting their time (as well as selling their souls) by entering such a moribund system in the first place?

The only potentially hopeful sign I see at the moment is the financial disaster on the Church Commissioners’ desks. Lack of finance may force the Church of England to redefine what it means by ministry, and to ask what is worth supporting. However, given its history, and the amount of self-interested scrambling that will perhaps inevitably take place among the people who will be making these decisions, it is perhaps more realistic to regard this potential hope as wishful thinking.

There is the additional problem that people in the Church of England appear to go to church for many disparate reasons, often social ones, to engage in what might irreverently be called, ‘tea party religion’. Without excluding this valid and useful social activity, the Church of England must decide what its principal function and purpose really is, from which all else must proceed. It must prioritise.

Is this governing principle to keep the comfortable cosy, using the model of the vestigial and often mythical country parish? (Which is not to say that there are not remarkable and healthy country parishes.) To be the ritual arm of the State, and ceremonial resource for the world (for all the world knows that no one does liturgy better than the C of E at its best)? To be a political pressure group? To be a moral force (though its credibility in this area, especially after the ordination debate, is deeply in doubt)? To be a colourful tourist attraction (it has been observed that it does some of its best work simply by keeping the cathedrals open and not bothering the millions of tourists who in some mysterious way find God in them—which is not to say that there are not cathedrals that are real centres of prayer)?

Or is it to bear the vision so that the people do not perish? —Which means back to the drawing board.

Notes

[23] For example, on a rare occasion when I agreed to facilitate a workshop for about forty mostly middle-aged women, there were two clergymen present , an Anglican in a collar and a nonconformist in civvies, and a newly ordained Anglican woman deacon, also in a collar. As the day progressed, the misery and pain these women had experienced at the hands of clergy started to pour out, obviously the first time they had ever dared to speak. I asked the clergy present, particularly the woman deacon, if they wanted to respond. The men participated in a low-key, penitential way; the woman deacon declined. In the afternoon we returned to a more conventional format. Afterwards, the men were very happy with the way the day had gone; the woman deacon vanished. A week later I was informed that she had written to the bishop, the suffragan, and virtually every diocesan official who might remotely be connected with education, complaining, in effect, that I was not in lockstep with the clergy and the official party line.

The terrible pain of exclusion and condemnation among the general public is more widespread than the clergy may wish to admit, and certainly more than they want to know. At the last Affirming Catholicism meeting I ever attended—it had gradually been taken over by the clergy, who were all sitting on one side of the table, while the four laypeople (both men and women) sat on the other—I simply lost it. I was also terrified, and so didn’t articulate very well. When my outpouring had ended, the clergy hastily turned to another laywoman there, who turned out to be the omsbudsperson for the diocese, saying surely my perception wasn’t representative. Sitting there in her plaid skirt, white blouse and sweater, she had the guts to say quietly, ‘I’m afraid that’s exactly the way it is.’