It is now thirty years since I resigned as a priest of the Church of England to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church. I was one of nearly 800 Anglican priests who resigned at that time over the crisis of authority in the Anglican Church brought on by the Church of England’s decision to ordain women as priests. The debate over women’s ordination took place at every level of the church: parish, deanery, diocesan and national. In my own parish council the matter was hotly debated and I said at that time, “Today you are debating women’s ordination. Twenty years from now you will be debating gay marriage.” My parishioners were shocked that I should make such a connection and actually raised their voices in strident opposition to the idea. However, it was clear to me at the time that the blurring of boundaries in the matter of sexual roles vis a vis ordination was part of a greater issue–the sanctity of marriage and, indeed the very nature (and future) of humanity.

In the years following our departure from the Anglican Church I had a conversation with a friend who tried very hard to remain. He eventually joined us in the Catholic Church, but then–just a few years after the first ordinations of women he told me an interesting story. He said he had gone to visit his mother in the West Country (a rural and generally more conservative part of the country and church) and, although he was an Anglo Catholic, he always attended the local parish with his mother. The parish was a typical Evangelical, low church parish and they were advertising for a new parish priest. The advertisement read, (among other requirements) “Marital status not important.” My friend explained, “In an evangelical parish that wording used to indicate that they really wanted a young married man with three well behaved children, but now across the board in the Church of England it means, “We’re not going to inquire what is happening in the vicarage bedroom”. He went on to tell me that in his travels across England and visiting Anglican parishes he could witness that in the vicarages of the Church of England you would find every permutation of living arrangements that you would find in the secular world: homosexual men cohabiting, lesbian women, single mothers, divorced men and their children, divorced and re-married men and women, men and women with multiple divorces and re-marriages, men and women cohabiting, single men and women who were “dating” and enjoying sleepovers, both heterosexual and homosexual men and women engaged in promiscuous lifestyles. His conclusion was that women’s ordination had fractured not only the priesthood and any semblance of unity with historic Christianity, but that it had also irreparably damaged Christian family life.

He explained that in his view as a lifelong Anglican, the married priest and his wife provided a model for Christian marriage and family life in the parish. Of course, like the discipline of celibacy for priests in our own church, it was never perfect, but at least the ideal was there as something to be lived up to. Furthermore, if the married priest and his wife provided a model of Christian family life for the parish, on a nationwide level, as the national church–this model provided stability and a positive example for the whole nation.

No more.

With the appointment of the feminist, “pro-choice” Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury and David Monteith – the partnered gay Dean of Canterbury (who has just risen to controversial prominence by authorizing graffiti stickers to be plastered throughout the cathedral) the character of the Church of England of the twenty-first century is now formal and explicit.