A calamity indeed

Tom Scott’s prophetic cartoon from nearly two years ago says most of it for me. The fulfilment came just a few days ago when three minor Anglican bishops stood in a line in the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral in London and were solemnly ordained into the Catholic priesthood.

These old boys had held some kind of roving episcopal commission in the Church of England, taking care of priests and parishioners unable to sleep at nights thinking of female priests, female bishops, gay and lesbian clergy, or anything “liberal”.

Now they are Catholic priests and they are the first of what Pope Benedict is calling a special ordinariate, whatever that is, for Anglicans who wish to go over to Rome but retain their Anglican ways in worship and whatnot. But they can’t be bishops any more because they are married. How feeble is that! Their compliant subservient wives, dressed uniformly in beige, stood meekly behind their husbands at the ordination holding the fresh folded priestly robes at the ready. So all was just as it should be.

One of the sadnesses for me is that I thought the Catholic Primate, Archbishop Vincent Nicholls, was a better person than that. How on earth did that intelligent man manage to go along with this fiasco? It was pointless, I thought, that he paid tribute to the generous spirit of the Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams, when we all know that the Archbishop of Canterbury was left with no choice.

Needless to say the cathedral was packed -- with everyone who still thinks it is impossible for the priesthood to be female or other than heterosexual and preferably celibate. The rest of us, around the world, looked on with despair.

It was a disaster of theology, a disaster of belief, a disaster of ecumenism, of sense and of grace and courtesy. If these three blokes needed to have catholic ordination it could have been done decently and in order in private. Instead they had to have this vulgar display. A calamity indeed.