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Holy Cow! Women Bishops at last!
July 8th, 2008 at 15:56
The Anglican Church has finally joined the 20th century this week, and has allowed the ordination of female Bishops – this was one of many brave moves passed at the recent meeting in York of the General Synod – along with declaring that moving pictures on a screen are not actual caused by witchcraft, and that the “popular music” that “young people” listen to isn’t going to cause the very fabric of reality to fall apart.
That last part is a lie of course, though I do think its pretty remarkable that it’s taken this long for the church to decide that women are all right – especially as so many male church officials seem pretty keen on wearing dresses, so you’d think they’d be all for gender equality.
Depressingly though, there’s a large number of church leaders – about a third of them – who are opposed to this and have gone as far as forming a “no girls” club of likeminded churches – throughout my research into this, I’ve been unable to determine whether these churches are all led by eight year old boys.
The reason they’re so opposed to the idea of women bishops is apparently that because (and lets assume the Bible is 100% true, for the sake of argument) Jesus’s disciples were all men… so no girls are allowed. Which is a pretty rubbish criterion to hire people on – maybe Jesus’s all male crew was a coincidence, and they were all hired on merit? The job criteria may have been: must think Jesus is ace; be willing to commute to Nazareth; be a team player – and the most suitable happened to be men? Or maybe Jesus wanted a football team? (His team wouldn’t even have to walk alone on water.) Or maybe they were all men as a consequence of world history basically being one long patriarchy?
The trouble for the church is even though it appears to have finally reached adolescence; it still faces a number of battles with the relentless onslaught of modernity and the passage of time. It can’t be long until perhaps the biggest taboo has to be tackled: the ordination of bishops who have other faiths.
Though I’m not a woman, I still feel as though the church is discriminating against me – I bet if I sent them my CV, they wouldn’t let me achieve my dream of being Archbishop of Canterbury – just because I’m not religious. Just because I don’t believe the same stories as Anglicans, I’ll never get a free palace just across the river from Parliament or the right to a seat in the House of Lords.
It’s madness really – there are probably thousands of women who would be great at doing… whatever it is that Bishops do. Barring people of other religions is just cutting of potential talent. Look at the Pope, for instance – he probably knows his Bible better than anyone, and if anything is probably over-qualified for the job of Anglican bishop, yet he won’t get the job just because he’s Catholic.
This status quo is quite clearly madness.
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