"Trotskyists?"

The Revd Dr Peter Mullen on those who wish to re-make the Church of England in their own image. The 1980s political analogy he uses is both completely apposite and, of course, in the context of God's holy Church, utterly tragic.
The difference, as I suspect we shall see, is that those who led the British Labour Party in the 1980s realised that the extreme left - an alien tradition which had pursued  a policy of infiltration and subversion of the 'host' culture- would destroy their movement and make it forever unelectable. They stood up to them and won.
Sadly, I think that's exactly where this analogy will break down.....

"Those who favour the ordination of women and the consecration of women bishops generally cite the example of the other professions. We have women doctors, women judges, women astronauts – why not women priests and bishops? The question simply misses the point by substituting secular standards of judgment for legitimate church order based on the authority of the Bible and the Church Fathers. The facts are as follows. The Gospels and Epistles in the New Testament nowhere authorise the ordination of women as priests, let alone their promotion to the rank of bishop. The 2,000-year-old Catholic Church, of which the Church of England in its Creed said every day claims to be a part, has never ordained women as priests or bishops.

If the church has been in the wrong all those centuries, on the basis of what authority is it now proposed that it should be put right? The innovators waffle all the time about “the guidance of the Holy Spirit leading us into new truths”. There are no such new truths. The truth is that the policy of ordaining women is a consequence only of fashionable and secular notions of feminism and imaginary “rights”........


Campaigners for women bishops call themselves “liberal” and “inclusive”. But their liberality and inclusiveness extends only as far as those who agree with them. This is not liberalism at all, of course. Those bigots are like Trotskyists who work within an institution to subvert it and to turn it into its opposite. They are the Church Militant Tendency. I have seen (and worse, heard) their raucous and savage triumphalism, sneering and gloating at the discomfiture of traditionalists. These people who began their feminising movement by pleading for tolerance are themselves intolerable.

Is it too much to hope that, even so late in the day, there may yet be space made for those conscientiously opposed to the consecration of women bishops? It is just possible that there are enough members of the Synod who will hold in revulsion the palpable injustice involved in the utter denial of integrity to those with whom they disagree..."

The full article is here