"No" for the Church of England

The bishops were for it. The laity endorsed it too. But the rank-and-file clergy of the Church of England vehemently opposed the idea. So, as English Anglicans held their autumn General Synod in the white-domed Church House behind Westminster Abbey last week, a proposal to ordain women to the priesthood was defeated 272-246.

The vote came as a mild surprise. At the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury last August, a broad consensus of bishops of the Anglican communion from 25 nations joined those of the mother church in agreeing that the volatile issue of women's ordination ought to be decided by each national church. By taking that position, observers thought, the English Anglicans were foreshadowing approval of the bitterly disputed proposal. The lead had already been taken by Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong with little backlash. But the U.S. cast a shadow: after a close pro-ordination vote for women in 1976, the church suffered an embarrassing schism when angry conservatives left to form a renegade Anglican Catholic denomination.

Not to worry, declared Hugh Montefiore, Bishop of Birmingham and leader of the synod camp pushing the motion. "Their culture is different from our own," he said of the U.S. "They actually enjoy confrontation and they tend to politicize where we play things down." But what of the danger that approval of women priests would rupture the fragile ecumenical bridge that the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches are building? Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan, the highest primate of the church and a proponent of women priests, sought to ease that concern by declaring of the Catholics: "I think they would welcome our lead." But in the end, the women were turned down. As Graham Leonard, bishop of Truro and leader of the conservative camp, summed it up: "I want women to be women."

Late into the London afternoon, as the sky darkened outside the high arched windows of the Church House dome, the debate sizzled on. Finally, almost an hour behind schedule, the clergy and laity filed into antechambers, the bishops remained in the assembly hall, and all three groups << conducted separate votes, with a majority in each needed to pass the motion. Results: laity 120-106 in favor; bishops 32-17 in favor; clergy 149-94 opposed. As the final antiordination tally was read, Dr. Una Kroll, an Anglican feminist, stood up in the gallery and cried out: "We asked for bread, but you gave us a stone."

For Kroll and some 100 other Anglican women hoping to be ordained, the most frustrating news was left unsaid: by church mandate, the issue cannot be formally reconsidered until a new synod convenes in 1980--and even then, with a crushing load of other business to settle, the Anglican leaders may not consent to hear the women's case until 1983 or later.

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