Fruits

By their fruits ye shall know them - beware!
And some bishops, I grieve to declare,
have permitted to preach
four pineapples, a peach,
three bananas, two grapes and a pear! - Leetle M

I have been hesitant to post about this for various reasons.

Firstly, I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Until fairly recently, I had long been a supporter of the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate. I have read around and studied this - it was even my topic of choice for one of my modules in 'A'-level Christian Theology. (Mine was the last year to be able to do Christian Theology before it was abolished and the national curriculum went down the "Religious Studies" route). In all of my study, I found little objection to the ordination of women.

In recent months, however, my own personal study has begun to lead me down a different path, but that isn't totally relevant. The reason that I say this is that I acknowledge an authority greater than my own mind. I refuse to be unthinking about such matters, but at the same time, I refuse to have the arrogance to believe that my tiny little mind can somehow overthrow the Truth that God has revealed to his Church and that the Saints have believed and practised for 2000 years before I came to be. The Church, in accordance with Holy Tradition, teaches that this cannot happen, and I accept this, for to accept the Truth of God, and to live in that Truth, is what it is to be Christian. I can do no other.

The second reason that I have not posted about this sooner is that, as somebody drawing nearer and nearer to leaving Anglicanism behind, I am not sure that this is my fight anymore. Part of me is sad that the church that has nourished my faith for 22 years is taking this path, but then another part of me wonders whether this is of any consequence in light of the same church's laxity about other aspects of the Faith. In my first post on this blog, I expressed my inability to accept the sort of approach to Christianity that embraces and affirms mutually exclusive "truths", and this is what I see in the Church of England - the Real Presence, the Apostolic Succession, the Resurrection - these are all aspects of the Faith which I believe ought to be taken as given, but there are open dissenters in the CofE whose positions are affirmed as equally valid to the understanding of them handed down to us through Tradition. How can this be? In light of Christ's promise to send the Holy Spirit to lead and guide us into all Truth, how can the CofE support this heresy? (For that is what it is!)

An all-embracing, false "liberalism" is masquerading as the Christian Faith! That the word Catholic means universal is batted about, with clearly no understanding of the actual meaning of the word. Yes, it means universal, but that is not an indiscriminate universality, in the sense of embracing as truth every whim that somebody has, in the belief that it is Spirit-led. No. Catholicism means just the opposite of that - it means universal as opposed to individualistic. Therefore is the ordination of women really that big a deal in light of everything else? Was the Church of England way beyond redemption before November of 1992?

As somebody who has most of his network somehow based in the Church of England, who has known nothing but Anglicanism as his own, it is extremely painful for me to answer yes to my question above, but in honesty, it is all that I can do.

It is only through reading Richard's recent post that I was moved to say something here, for I was very moved by what is clearly a very difficult time for him and others in a similar position. I can but pray, and I ask you to do the same.