Marching orders?

The voice of authoritarian 'inclusivity': the comments in The Telegraph this morning of the Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin. Tipped by some as a leading candidate to be a bishop in the Church of England, she is clearly unaware of the difference between apartheid and apostolicity, and appears to view the Christian faith as a kind of religious supermarket: if you don't like the new management's make-over, then go and shop somewhere else. There will be casualties as a result of these broken promises - truth being the first.

“It is like apartheid,” says Hudson-Wilkin, who was born in Jamaica. “A lot of these guys are saying, 'Oh, we accept that women have got to be made bishops, it’s just that we don’t really want them to minister to us.’ It’s not that dissimilar from those who said, 'OK, we accept that apartheid needs to be abolished but can we just have one bus which is white only, so we can ride in it?’ ”

So would she be prepared to serve as a bishop on those terms? “No,” she says flatly. She would turn the job down? “Absolutely.”
Other leading candidates such as Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James’s, Piccadilly, are thought to agree, but would some women be willing to accept the conditions? “I hope there won’t be. It will be very sad if there are......”
“The Church is desperately trying to hold everybody together, and we haven’t understood that this is not going to be possible. To try to do that is to put on a sticking plaster that is going to curl at the edge and fall apart. It cannot be sustainable. The whole thing is a mess. We need to say, as a Church, 'We ordain men and women.’ Full stop. All the way to the top. For those who feel that they can’t live with it? They’re adults. By all means, go to Rome. Join the Ordinariate. Don’t stay and make demands of the Church. It’s wrong.”