This is a story of the Immortal Diamond, the Cherry on the Knickerbocker Glory of Anglicanism. The Anglican Church in Wales has just elected its new primate. This is the Bishop of Monmouth, the Right Rev Cherry Vann, 66.
She has a nice face, and all decent people surely wish her well. Part of the interest in the story is that Vann has a civil partner, of long standing, called Wendy Diamond. She has told interviewers that, from discovering her own sexuality, it took her 20 years to tell her parents she was gay.
If we went back in a time machine even 30 years, most people, liberal or conservative, would have found this story incomprehensible. A woman who is not merely a priest but an archbishop, and one who is openly gay? And there will be many today who consider it a sign that the Anglican Communion has gone bonkers.
But as the interminable process of selecting a new Archbishop of Canterbury grinds on, Vann’s appointment gives those of us who care about the survival of the Anglican Church much to ponder, not least because among those thought to be the “bookies’ favourites” for the role is a woman, the Right Rev Guli Francis-Dehqani, the Iranian-born Bishop of Chelmsford (and as far as I know, straight).
Some time ago Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Bishop of Dover and a former chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, declared that those Anglicans who were unable to accept the ordination of women should be forced to do so. This intolerant viewpoint wants to abolish a wonderfully Alice-in-Wonderland provision that allows a compromise for those who do not believe in female ordination.
These parishes have their own provincial episcopal visitors, otherwise known as “flying bishops”, who have not ordained women and who are therefore invited to ordain these parishes’ priests and conduct their confirmation services. The parishioners believe themselves, as Anglicans have traditionally believed, to be part of one holy catholic and apostolic church, and their bishops are therefore just as much bishops as those of the Orthodox churches or the great Church of Rome.
It may well be the case that the majority of Christians in the world — Catholic and Orthodox — are the inheritors of a tradition that is patriarchal if not actually misogynistic; but this is where they are and, as far as promoting the Gospel of Christ is concerned, it is surely better for Christians, despite all the unhappy divisions of the past, to stand together.
It is on this basis that traditionalist Anglicans objected to the ordination of women and it was for this reason that the synod allowed them to have flying bishops who were able to dissociate themselves from the mainstream, progressive worldwide Anglican acceptance of women priests and bishops.
Christ founded His church on a rock, but the Church of England — in reality more the creation of Elizabeth I than of her father Henry VIII — was founded on fudge. Catholic-minded Christians shared the sacraments with Protestants and with the wishy-washies in between.
You did not notice the extent of the fudge so long as the differences between them were as esoteric as what happened in the Eucharist — whether the bread was or was not the body of Christ. But whether the priest at the altar is or is not a woman is (usually) a matter of indisputable fact. Hence, civil war in the Anglican ranks.
If the Bishop of Dover had her way the diehards — among them the most faithful of priests and most devout of congregations — would be driven out, to Rome or the wilderness. This would surely be sad, and unnecessary, because to be Anglican should involve learning how to live with fudge and, like Pascal, to believe in two totally contradictory things at once.
The writer Rose Macaulay, a great Anglican, wrote that no church could ever be as true as the Roman Catholics believe their church to be true. That is why many Anglicans, myself included, see no reason to make up our minds about the thorny question of female ordination. We can see that both sides in this debate are right.
The traditionalists are right to want to hold on to the historic claims of their episcopate. The progressives, however, are also right — so very, very right — to say not only that our perceptions of human character and human sexuality have changed but that a great deal of what was considered morality in the past was not merely wrong, it was a hypocrisy, a denial of what was real.
Jesus never mentioned homosexuality, as far as we know, and he was on record as having scandalised even his own disciples by valuing women who were considered outsiders: the Syro-Phoenician mother who wanted “crumbs” from the master’s table; the widow and her mite; the Samaritan woman at the well; the woman “of the town” who bathed his feet and hair with her tears. All highly subversive stories.
Scholarship is divided on the subject of whether the early Christians had women ministers. My hunch is that the women who ran some of Saint Paul’s city churches in Corinth and Thessalonika probably did preside at the Eucharist — but who knows?
The more immediate question is: what does the church of today say about the love of God in Christ? Does it say, grudgingly, that God is prepared to overlook the supposed and inescapable “fault” of being gay, being a sexual being, being a human being? Or does it embrace the exciting possibility that women, who have kept the church going for the past 2,000 years, might actually be just as capable of exercising priesthood as men?
That is why my heart leapt with joy when I read of the promotion of Cherry to the primacy of Wales. Of course, as in almost all stories about Anglicanism, there is an element of comedy in the parable of the Cherry and the Diamond. But it is surely an indication of the kind of role Anglicanism can play in public life from now on, in an age when it looks highly unlikely that it will ever revive in huge numbers.
As a churchgoer, I do not absolutely insist that the next Archbishop of Canterbury should be a lesbian, though I would much prefer it if she were. If not a lesbian, then let us have someone who realises the potential in the role. That is, not to shore up the establishment but to prod it, from inside and without.
Courtesy: The Times, UK
