A question for Anglicans

[Ted]

Spot

Thanks. I'll be here as long as I can make this machine creep along. Talk about slow! Sometimes I wonder if it is going to work at all.

I may be away for a week. If I am I will get a new machine when I get back, If I stay home I may go and get it tomorrow.

Yes, the mountains across the straight are absolutely beautiful. It is even nice to see the snow OVER THERE.

Shalom
Ted

[Bryn Mawr]

Originally Posted by spot

My dear boy, I completely missed seeing that invitation last time around. You actually want me to tell the tale? I'll try to write it this evening.

Did you ever get the chance to write this?

[oscar]

Originally Posted by Bryn Mawr

Did you ever get the chance to write this?

Yes Spot, come along... I'm waiting as well with interest.

[spot]

Golly.

I wish I knew whether it was true, that's all.

I'll type it today. I've no idea who to ask to find out if it happened.

[Ted]

Wow

500gigs and a 4 core processor. I don't think this fast.

Shalom
Ted

[spot]

Well, I'll give it a go but I've failed to find anyone so far who can tell me what really happened.

Around the corner from me is All Saints With Saint John's Clifton, Bristol's High Anglican smells-and-bells community. All Saints was built in mid-Victorian days for exactly that purpose - burning incense, wearing the right regalia and moving slowly in procession. It was bombed out in 1943 and rebuilt in 1967. During the interim the congregation moved in with Saint John's on Blackboy Hill, after they moved back they took the Saint John's congregation with them and Saint John's building was sold to a fine-art auctioneer.

Mervyn Stockwood, who became a famous left-leaning public-speaking High Church Bishop of Southwark, holidayed regularly near All Saints, joined its congregation before the war and was moulded by its atmosphere, eventually being ordained in Bristol and getting a ministry in Bristol's East End tenements. After his various moves he retired to Bristol and finally ran All Saints for half a year around 1978.

In the early 1960s it became clear that the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the See of Clifton was an unsafe structure. Eventually, in 1965, a new 900-seat cathedral was built 400 yards from the brand-new All Saints.

In the late 1980s I attended at the New Rooms a public lecture on Ecumenism which Mervyn Stockwood addressed. In passing he mentioned that All Saints had made an offer to the Roman Catholic bishop which hadn't been taken up.

I suspect that what he said was that All Saints had offered the use of their new and unoccupied church, which seats 800, for the Cathedral's congregation to hold services in while they were homeless.

It's possible, though unlikely, that he said the Bristol diocese had offered the new church to be the new Roman Catholic Cathedral as an act of ecumenical solidarity. That seems unlikely but it was what I had in my mind for a while as the trigger for my alternate-world moment. What I wrote above was that "I can pinpoint the one moment which existed in the 20th century for Anglicanism to re-enter communion with Rome and end up with no Women Priests much less Women Bishops, it's a turning point in world history and it happened fifty years ago five hundred yards from where I live".

Anyway, my theoretical alternate-world act of reconciliation of the Church of England with Roman Catholicism, right at the high tide of Vatican Two, would have been offering Saint Augustine's, the Anglican Cathedral on College Green, which had seen worship for centuries before Henry's break with Rome, as the replacement Roman Catholic cathedral. No Roman Catholic community in Britain has, as far as I know, a building which pre-dates the split. It would have been an act that echoed round the world, handing the cathedral over. If it had brought the two churches into communion there would have been no possible way for Synod to introduce women priests twenty years later (which finally gets me back to the thread's topic!). It is, admittedly, an idle thought and I'm quite sure it was entirely impossible given the state of the Church of England at the time. I'd still like to know what the actual offer from All Saints was. I've searched the Reference Library to no avail. I'll ask a priest eventually if I can find one who was around back then.

[spot]

Originally Posted by Ted

Wow

500gigs and a 4 core processor. I don't think this fast.

Shalom
Ted

You made the leap and bought your new machine?

If you type twenty books a year for the next ten thousand years you'll use 10% of that disk.

[Bez]

I have encountered several lady vicars and have found them to be wonderful people and they bring a certain 'modernatity' to the church which I like.

I have no problem with gay vicars either.......I know several gay people both male and female and they are all wonderful, caring people.

I only have problems with those who step outside the bounds of human decency and are abusers, bullies, liars, thieves, murderers etc.

[spot]

Originally Posted by Bez

I only have problems with those who step outside the bounds of human decency and are abusers, bullies, liars, thieves, murderers etc.

Ah - the remainder of the clergy who are neither gay nor female!