more conservatives :( - First group of Anglican bishops to convert to Rome. Here's part of a post in The Guardian from Anglican Bishop Alan Wilson .....
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The flying bishops crash to earth
The resignation of England's southern flying bishops comes as no surprise. I have long liked and admired Andrew Burnham as a colleague, and I'm delighted that, having identified his true spiritual home, he has taken the courageous step of actually doing something about it, and joining the denomination within which his spiritual life and ministry can truly flourish. He meant it when he said earlier this year:
"Traditionalists have been beaten four-square. When ... the Measure comes into force, there will be no more Resolution A and B, no more 'petitioning parishes'. There will be no more 'flying bishops', no more Beverley, Ebbsfleet, and Richborough. There will be again the assurance of good behaviour: no one will be overfaced by women priests and bishops ministering where they are not wanted. But there will be no guarantees ... Avoiding women ministers will become not a conviction about Catholic Order, shared throughout the ages, but a matter of sexual discrimination, abhorrent to all of us."
As the term "traditionalist" inflates, it takes in people with completely incompatible theologies whose only commonality seems to be objection to the monstrous regiment. Inquiring minds wonder how this can have nothing to do with gender discrimination.
Younger people than me just don't understand how avoiding women ministers can be disconnected from gender discrimination. Busmen went on strike in the 1960s against black people being allowed to drive buses, protesting that this was not racial discrimination. Yeah, right. Unfortunately, back on planet Earth, discriminatory is as discriminatory does. You can say your tradition mandates this discrimination, but not that it isn't what it manifestly is. Why should anybody wish to be deceived? .........
[I]n 1994, the Church of England, in embarrassment and kindness attempted an ecclesiological three card trick: simultaneously to have and not have female priests, depending on your point of view. The hard truth that no one was convinced can hardly be a surprise. Neither is it kind to carry on pretending about basic ecclesiology. With hindsight, perhaps the whole charade caused rather more pain than it ever saved.
What it has also done is sour the church's ability to celebrate the gift of female priestly ministries. With the endgame approaching for Anglo-Papalism, increasingly shrill traditionalist noises have only increased the dissonance. The Church needs to trust the guidance of the Holy Spirit that it thinks it has received and confirmed in practice, as well as respecting the women it has ordained sufficiently to act as though it believed in their orders wholeheartedly. That's all, but anything less is ecclesiological mincemeat ..........
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