The Plateau

According to a CNS report, Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, of Westminster, England, sees ecumenism achieving a plateau with the threatened (if that is the right word) consecration of a woman as a bishop in the Anglican Communion. For those of us who have longed for a greater union with the Anglican Communion but for whom the traditional teaching of the Magisterium is the final arbiter with respect to what is Good, Just, and True, the plateau has, perhaps, already been crossed with the consecration of a bishop who rejects the traditional teaching on the Sacrament of Matrimony and the willfull ignoring of another bishop who rejects the teachings on the Real Presence and the Resurrection. For us, we are already more than half-way down the other side of the mountain.

I'm not altogether sure why the plateau wasn't reached when the first women were ordained to the priesthood. The Cardinal notes that "a bishop is in a particular way a figure of unity," but he also admits that once you've admitted women to the priesthood "it's probably inevitable that in due course there will be the ordination of women as bishops." In any case, the teaching has to do with the admission of women to Holy Orders simpliciter, not the admission of women to any particular grade of Holy Orders. But his point is taken: if things were bad before, they are beyond worse now, what with traditional morality under attack and the last vestiges of doctrinal slowly dissolving in the acid of contemporary secular values.

A possible complication to this mess, however, of particular interest to folks like me, is the question it raises about the status of folks in the more traditional dioceses in this country who now style themselves as the Anglican Communion Network (see, for example, the website for the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh). Most of them, so far as I know, have no objection to the ordination of women to the priesthood--their decision to mark themselves off somehow from the rest of the Episcopal Church was grounded not in the ordination of women, but rather in the consecration of Gene Robinson. One way to view that consecration, one might have thought, is as a camel-back breaking straw, but apparently it was something rather different. After all, if there is nothing wrong with the admission of women to Holy Orders, then the only reasons for excluding them from the episcopacy are purely prudential rather than moral, and it would be a matter of considerable injustice to prevent them from holding that position. No: if they may not be bishops, the only reason that is morally permissible is that they may not be admitted Holy Orders at all. But most members of the Anglican Communion Network appear to accept the legitimacy of admitting women to Holy Orders, so presumably they will have no objection to the consecration of women as bishops.

These things are mysterious for now, however, since I, for one, haven't seen any statements from members of the ACN on this particular question. In the end, one must trust in God and pray that His will be done.