Damion Thompson writes in the Telegraph that The Church of England is Protestant Again:
A couple of hours ago, the Church of England decisively severed itself from its Catholic roots. By voting to ordain women bishops without significant safeguards for traditionalists, it reasserted its identity as a Protestant Church. Whether it will be a liberal or conservative Protestant denomination remains to be seen. But any hope of unity with Rome and the Orthodox has gone forever.
I’m not sorry. From the moment the C of E voted to ordain women priests in 1992, it cut itself off from the Catholic mainstream. But unexpectedly generous safeguards allowed traditionalists to cordon themselves off from the rest of the Church, persuading themselves that they, rather than the main body, preserved its true Catholic identity.
This was always a delusion, and now it is truly unsustainable. The General Synod tonight made a commonsense decision. If you have women priests, you must have women bishops - indeed, I remember Dr David Hope, then Bishop of London, telling me that the Church should in theory have started with women bishops and then moved on to priests.
What the Anglo-Catholics have lost tonight is their standing in the Church of England. They are no longer honoured traditionalists who have been allowed to preserve an (almost) watertight communion of their own, nurtured by powerful bishops who sustain their sacramental purity.
From now on, they will be the C of E’s granny in the attic, whose eccentricities are tolerated only at family get-togethers. If, that is, they are silly enough to stay.
What a painful debate this was. This time round, in contrast to 1992, the Synod knew it was demolishing a wing of the building, and there was preciously little triumphalism. Dr Rowan Williams seemed especially crushed: he had argued - reluctantly - for tight safeguards for traditionalists, but the assembly ignored his advice. That doesn’t bode well for Lambeth.
David Ould writes on Stand Firm in Faith about The Narrowing of the Broad Church:
So it’s happened. The Church of England has voted for the single clause option on women bishops with a code of practice to look after dissenters, but no legal provision. The decision not to have legal provision was taken in order to defend the validity of women bishops - to legislate provision for those who dissent would be, it was argued, to undermine the authority of the women bishops. It must be granted that this makes logical sense, nevertheless it finally puts to rest the oft-repeated liberal lie that we are a broad church with room for everyone. I have to say, I feel like an unwelcome stranger in my own church. I am now, in a way, a criminal and my crime is the outrageously henious act of not moving at all….
And here’s a post from Per Christum
And a comment by carl on Stand Firm:
The purpose of Liberal religion is to quest for the Authentic Self. The end goal is not to find God, but to find you. Any path to any legitimate endstate will suffice so long as the end state is ‘authentic’ because God is well-pleased when we ‘discover our true selves.’ It is this collection of ‘authenticities’ - self-identified authentic states of man - that liberals wish to establish. Implicit is the assumption that man is basically good. The preceding cannot be true if the authentic self is dead in sin.
And this is why liberal religion has so much trouble with orthodox Christianity. It denies that the purpose of religion is to ‘find self.’ It denies that any ‘authentic endstate’ is pleasing to God. It asserts that the authentic state of man is defined by sin, and wrath, and judgment. It asserts that Holiness and not authenticity is pleasing to God. It asserts binding eternal truths that deny the right of man to glory in man’s authentic self. That is what they call ‘exclusion.’