You’re not the only one “ranting”. See this:

Church of England’s parliament is ’sinful’ over women bishops vote, says Bishop of Fulham

The Church of England’s governing body is sinful and should be destroyed, according to a leading traditionalist.

The Rt Rev John Broadhurst, the Bishop of Fulham, condemned the General Synod for going against the Bible and tradition by voting to introduce women bishops without making provision for opponents to the historic reform.

In a strongly-worded speech, he also declared the 80 million-strong Anglican Communion “finished” and likened the organisation of its once-a-decade meeting, the Lambeth Conference, to Stalin’s Russia.

His comments come amid continuing turmoil in the Church of England over the ordination of female bishops.

In July the Synod, the 467-member “parliament” which is made up of lay members as well as clergy and bishops, voted that women should be admitted to the episcopate with only as unwritten code of practice to cater for Anglo-Catholics and conservative evangelicals who are bitterly opposed to the innovation.

The controversial decision not to create special “men-only” dioceses or a new class of “flying bishops” for traditionalists left one bishop in tears and led to threats of a mass exodus from the church of more than 1,300 clergy.

As The Sunday Telegraph reported last week, bishops are now working on a new plan to avoid a damaging split by bringing in flying bishops to cater for opponents of women prelates.

In a keynote address to the annual meeting of Forward in Faith, the church’s Anglo-Catholic wing of which he is chairman, Bishop Broadhurst told members that the Synod’s decision had been wrong and urged them not to leave the church as the outcome of the dispute could still be changed.

He said: “The General Synod is presuming to change things as it wills, presuming to decide doctrine separate from the tradition, separate from scripture, separate from the universal brief and practice of the church. Sinful presumption, sinful.

“This is not a vote we’ve lost, this is sin. This is human beings presuming to tell God in Jesus Christ he got it wrong, presuming to tell the majority of Christians we know better.”

He went on to say the Synod is “unfit for purpose” because it does not consider God first and added to applause: “The sooner it is trimmed, culled, sorted or even destroyed, the better.”

Bishop Broadhurst, who earlier in the year accused liberals of “institutional bullying” and warned of legal battles over churches if traditionalists defect to Rome, added that the Synod’s decisions can be undone and reiterated that he wants it to create a separate jurisdiction enshrined in law for opponents of women bishops, not a “ghetto for bigots”.

He also declared that the worldwide Anglican Communion is “finished” and called the Lambeth Conference “horrendous”.

The meeting earlier this summer was boycotted by 200 bishops because of the presence of liberal Americans and Canadians who have gone against church teaching on homosexuality, and was branded an expensive exercise in futility as no votes were taken on the divisive issues of whether gay clergy and same-sex blessings should be allowed.

“Manipulation worthy of Stalin’s Russia,” Bishop Broadhurst said. “All may talk but none may have a say. All may talk but no votes.”

From here.

Thanks for this. All this supports my notion that it is little short of insane for FtW, Quincy, SanJ and FIF/NA to affiliate with the proposed ACNA unless the parties to it agree, at the very least, to an absolute moratorium on WO to the presbyterate. I have been sounding this note in season and out of season, and including the bishops of those three dioceses on the distribution list for my “ratings.” For them to affiliate with a “province” that so institutionalizes WO that a supermajority is necessary either to end it or make it mandatory, is simply to attempt to create a second “Elizabethan Settlement” — about which Dix once wrote “Except for those doctrines upon which there was a general conventional orthodoxy at the moment quite apart from her dogmatic teaching, the English Church was to have no teaching and no revelation. Conformists might in their hearts believe what they willed of all the doctrines on which men differed, provided they conformed. It was the authority of a church by its own 21st Article admittedly fallible most thoroughly enforced.” (“The Revealing Church,” *Laudate* VIII:29 [March 1930], pp. 24-46)

But who will “enforce” this Neo-Elizabethan Settlement, absent a “Supreme Governor, as well in all causes spiritual or ecclesiastical, as temporal or civil?” Lacking such, it seems fated to expire, as the Marxists would say, of its own inner contradictions. Still, it seems a sad denoument for Anglo-Catholicism within ECUSA, to leave the “House of Bondage” and yet cast themselves into a situation which perpetuates the very thing against which they have been struggling for over 35 years. I cannot but think of the old adage “Quos Iuppiter vult perdere dementat prius.”

No abuse of hospitality whatever, when you add greatly to the conversation.

And thanks, Sam, for the comments. Quite agree with them in their entirety.

ABUSING THEMSELVES: THE WINDSOR REPORT AND THE ORDINATION OF WOMEN

“With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard’s knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. ‘Fly, you fools!’ he cried, and was gone.”

In an earlier article on the Windsor Report, “Abusing the Fathers: The Windsor Report’s misleading Appeal to Nicea” in the April 2005 issue of *Touchstone* I examined how the Windsor Report seriously misrepresents the teaching and practice of the Church Fathers in regard to bishops’ intervening in the affairs of dioceses with heretical bishops, in an attempt to press them into service to support the report’s attempt to prohibit such interventions. Here I wish to discuss another, and equally glaring, absurd feature of that flawed document: its stealthy attempt to to fix forever the acceptance of the “ordination” of women as one of the defining characteristics of Anglicanism. In this regard, “stealthy” is the operative word, as the Windsor Report presents its readers with a “pseudohistory” of the women’s ordination debate within the Anglican Communion to back up its attempt to declare (or rather insinuate) that the question has been settled and the innovation “received” (to quote the bureaucratic lingo for “freely accepted”). Having abused the Fathers in the matter of border crossings, the Windsor Report abuses conservative Anglicans and the Anglican tradition itself in its eagerness to “resolve” this other issue (an eagerness, by the way, which it manifested gratuitously, as nothing in the terms of reference under which the commission that produced the report mandated or even suggested that it should weigh in on this question).

Paragraphs 12-21 of the Windsor Report give an account of the women’s ordination controversy within the Anglican Communion, describing it as a process of “mutual discernment” — and one which, as paragraph 22 goes on to state could and should have been the sort of precedent to follow in order to deal successfully with the current controversy over practiced homosexuality. The account in these paragraphs is austerely institutional, describing the inconclusive Resolution 34 of the 1968 Lambeth Conference on the issue (which had been submitted to it by the Diocese of Hong Kong & Macao), the 1970 resolution of the Anglican Consultative Council (which passed by a 24 to 22 vote) that such ordinations would be acceptable if the requisite institutional procedures were followed, Resolution 21 of the 1978 Lambeth Conference which recognized the “legal right” of each Anglican church to make its own decisions on the matter, the noncommittal Resolution 1 of the 1988 Lambeth Conference which recognized differences of principle on the issue but which recommended “maintaining the highest possible degree of communion” between the differing Anglican churches and the work of “The Commission on Women in the Episcopate” — the first “Eames Commission” — to monitor the “process of reception” of women bishops. At the end, paragraph 21 described the whole process as a success, in the sense that the process was carried out “without division.”

The amazing thing about this section is that while it does not contain so much as a single false statement, the effect of its institutional focus is to insinuate the conclusion that the whole process has been gentle and painless, and has in the end come to a harmonious resolution. This is a grotesquely false representation of what actually happened. It ignores entirely the formation of pressure groups, the generation of publicity, the presentation of arguments largely devoid of theological contents, the demonization of opponents and dismissal of their arguments, the uncanonical (meaning “illegal”) ordinations of women, in the United States (1974, 1975) and in Australia (1992), in order to force the issue, the narrow victories which proponents won, the (in the event entirely bogus) offer of “conscience clauses” to traditionalists, in order to encourage them not to leave, with the hope that the decision to ordain women might be reversed or, if not, that those of a traditional stance would have a safe and secure place in their churches and the subsequent pressures upon dioceses whose bishops had opposed women’s ordination to elect bishops eager to introduce female clergy — just as it avoids any allusion to the exodus of clergy and laity from some of the Anglican churches that adopted the ordination of women to Rome, to Orthodoxy and (most amazingly of all) to the Continuing Anglican churches and other “para-Anglican” bodies, almost all of which arose in reaction to the decision of one or another Anglican church to ordain women. And it avoids any allusion to these “down to earth” matters, it must be said, because to include them would show, contrary to the view of the Windsor Report itself, that the process which has been followed to date on the issue of the practice of sodomy as an acceptably Christian “lifestyle” is exactly parallel to that which the proponents of women’s ordination pioneered a quarter-century earlier.

The issue of the ordination of women to the priesthood has hardly been settled in the Anglican Communion, much less that of the ordination of women to the episcopate. But, given the manner in which the Windsor Report wishes to frame its contrast of the two issues, the one handled properly, the other not, it can hardly admit this. Rather, it must forge ahead to postulate a “logical,” if absurd, conclusion in the section of the report dealing with elections to the episcopate. Paragraph 126, coming between a paragraph that states that the acceptability for selection as bishops of persons who have been divorced and remarried is unclear (paragraph 125) and another that states that the unacceptability of those involved in “same gender unions” is clear (paragraph 127) has to be quoted in full:

There are some matters over which the Communion has expressed its mind. As we have seen, the contentious issue of ordaining women as bishops was the subject of extensive debate and discussion in the Communion for some considerable time before a common mind was reached. After lengthy deliberation, the Instruments of Unity concluded that although the ministry of a woman as bishop might not be accepted in some provinces, that represented a degree of impairment which the Communion could bear. (emphasis mine)

What does this mean? It has been read by many as stating, or at least insinuating (and the Windsor Report appears to have a penchant for insinuating matters which it might seem imprudent to declare outright), that the “process of reception” in the matter of the ordination of women is over, that the innovation has been “received,” and such a reading appears to have convinced a prominent Anglo-Catholic priest of my acquaintance engaged in a prolonged battle with his “revisionist” bishop that there is no future within the Episcopal Church or even the Anglican Communion for those with his, and his parishioners’, convictions. Initially, I thought such a conclusion unlikely, since there are numerous Anglican church provinces where women are not ordained to the priesthood, and only three of them — Canada, New Zealand and the United States — have women bishops. What I thought it meant to conclude, or insinuate, as its “common mind” was that the toleration by all the constituent member churches of the Anglican Communion of an innovation rejected for themselves by some of these constituent member churches (hence “impairment”) is (always?) preferable to disruption of the Anglican Communion. Put differently, it says that institutional maintenance (which is what is meant by the phrase “the Communion” towards the end) is more important than a common faith or sacramental communion (cf. “impairment” — i.e., of communion in faith and sacraments). It seems therefore to be insinuating that the primary duty of individual Anglican churches is to maintain membership of the organization, even if there is such disagreement about fundamental matters that “communion” in the more traditional, sacramental, sense of the term cannot be maintained. It is possible to put this view in a more cynical manner, by seeing paragraph 126 as an attempt at ecclesiastical legerdemain, its first sentence flashing before the bemused, and perhaps gullible, onlookers that which the second sentence snatches away again. “A common mind has been reached,” on the one hand, “but it amounts to an agreement to disagree” (and perhaps to “avert one’s eyes”), on the other.

This is what I believed paragraph 126 meant. But when I thought this I had not yet considered (or even looked at) the “Anglican Covenant” which the Windsor Report proposes in its Appendix Two — a “covenant” whose purpose, as there defined is “to foster greater unity and to consolidate our understandings of communion” among the member churches of the Anglican Communion. Article 12 (“Apostolic and Ministerial Commitments”) of this document states that each Anglican church shall:

1 uphold the historic threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons; 2 recognize the canonical validity of orders duly conferred in every member church; 3 welcome persons episcopally ordained in any member church to minister in the host church subject to … the law of that church; and 4 permit any person ordained in that church to seek ministry in any other member church subject to its law and discipline

Unless “canonical validity” is to be contrasted with some other sort of “validity” (sacramental validity?), and “duly” with an implicit “unduly” — all of which is passed over in the most complete silence — then it does seem that the effect of the Windsor Report, if not the intentions of those who composed it, is to put an end to the “reception period” in which the ordination of women has been — purportedly — “tested” and to declare (or rather, once again, insinuate) that it has been “received” by the Anglican Communion as a whole, even though some of its individual member churches have been unable or unwilling to practice it themselves, or at least not yet. But this, in turn, raises the question of whether the event which triggered the uproar which occasioned the Windsor Report, the election and consecration of the heterosexually divorced and homosexually partnered Vicky Gene Robinson, can with any plausibility be represented as (in the case of his election) “canonically invalid” or (in the case of his episcopal consecration) “unduly conferred.” No more, I would say, than the election and consecration of Barbara Harris in 1989 as Suffragan (assistant) Bishop of Massachusetts, and no less. And from this it would appear that, absent an effective means, if not a willingness, on the part of conservative bishops and churches in the Anglican Communion to reject (or ignore) the parallelism between the two issues and to proceed to try to lay down the law to the Episcopal Church, its supporters and friends when the Anglican Primates gathered in Northern Ireland in February 2005 — or, as a last effort, at the 2008 Lambeth Conference — the innovationists will have won, however long it may take thereafter to bring the rest of the Anglican Communion into line. In such a case, Anglicans conservative on the homosexual issue, churches as well as individuals, will have the choice of leaving or acquiescing — the same choice that has faced opponents of the ordination of women for many years, and which so many of them have contrived for so long to avoid resolving. It is remarkable how the more conservative Anglican proponents of priestesses appear unable or unwilling to see how the Windsor Report’s pseudohistory of the ordination of women controversy within the Anglican Communion, and in particular its blithe inattention to the way in which the course of the earlier controversy parallels the later one, all-but-ensures that the innovators in the current controversy over homosexual practice will prevail in the same manner that those in the earlier controversy over women’s ordination did. The conservative “orthodox” in the Episcopal Church would be well advised to heed Gandalf’s advice (lacking as they do a Gandalf of their own), especially as their Balrog, far from having fallen into an abyss, is among them, and has been busy picking them off, one by one.

I note this statement from the ACI offering linked above:

The obedient form of differentiation suggested by the pattern of Christ is not separation but faithful persistence along a different path within the fellowship of the church that has nurtured one as a Christian but has, nonetheless, gone astray.

Is it? The Nicene fathers would find it oddly incoherent to imagine that one could remain “within the fellowship of the church” simply by staying put — if one’s “church” was led by an Arian bishop it was by definition outside the fellowship of the Church.

I do hope though that in resisting the oversimplification of the Nicene canons we do not fall prey to other temptations. Despite a somewhat suicidal tone, the ACI statement is right in its caution about placing oneself and one’s friends outside the judgment of God. The chaos of the 4th-5th centuries no more justifies misuse of authority than it does the straw notion of inviolable episcopal boundaries. There in particular I find Dr Tighe’s criticism of +Durham’s “thin” reading of the Tradition compelling: if we really want to be conciliar, orthodox Christians, we have a lot more to worry about than whether it is ok for Nigerian bishops to church plant in America.