General Synod: Tuesday
General Synod – Summary of Business Conducted on Tuesday 7th February am
This includes an audio recording of the whole debate.
The Times Ruth Gledhill Synod inches towards women bishops
Archbishop of Canterbury’s Sermon at Eucharist service, General Synod London
Change in the order of business for Wednesday:
Questions 17-25 relating to the Octavia Hill Estates will be taken on Wednesday morning immediately after the Legislative Business.
Evening Update
General Synod – Summary of Business Conducted on Tuesday 7th February pm
Again complete audio files are available there.
Press reports of Monday's debates
The Times Ruth Gledhill
Disunity ‘is the cost of women being bishops’
Synod in disinvestment snub to Israel
Also, Ruth’s blog has Church-Israel row looms as synod backs Caterpillar divestment
Telegraph Jonathan Petre
Williams backs bid to disinvest in firms that aid Israeli ‘occupiers’
Cardinal’s warning on women bishops
Guardian Stephen Bates
Church votes to sell off shares in Caterpillar
BBC Robert Pigott
Synod tackles women bishop debate
Today radio programme excerpts (Real Audio)
The spring Synod of the Church of England is attempting to reach a compromise over women bishops. Listen here
The Rt Rev Christopher Hill, Bishop of Guildford, and Dr John Broadhurst, Bishop of Fulham, on the proposals for a compromise over the issue of women bishops Listen here
Church Times
Monday’s Synod round-up
Octavia Hill Estates
Last Friday, the Church Commissioners made a decision to sell their remaining holdings of property in the Octavia Hill Estates. The press release announcing this decision is here:
Church Commissioners select buyer for London residential properties.
This action was opposed before the decision was taken, and continues to be opposed by a variety of groups. Some reports on this:
Ekklesia Church of England accused of acting unethically over homes sale
LondonSE1 Waterloo and Union Street homes sold by Church Commissioners
BBC MPs’ shock at church homes sale and Protest on church homes sell-off
Guardian Archbishop intervenes in row over £200m estates sale.
24dash.com Octavia Hill residents stage protest over Church of England’s decision to sell homes
A letter, from the three MPs whose constituents are affected by this, to all members of the synod was issued today, and the text of it appears in full below the fold.
1 CommentGeneral Synod: Monday report
The official report of today’s business can be found here. Audio recordings of the proceedings have been posted. (The .wax files can be heard using Windows Media Player.)
As the report shows, synod declined to extend the session beyond 7 pm, and this meant that the last item of scheduled business was not completed by the time of adjournment. Therefore no debate yet occurred on the motion from the Bishop of Southwark relating to investments in land and real estate, which would give an opportunity for a substantive discussion of the Octavia Hill Estates matter.
2 CommentsSunday radio
The BBC radio programme Sunday has several items of Anglican interest today. Real Player required.
Rowan Williams is interviewed about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
It’s easy to understand why Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian, is a hero, even a saint, to German Christians. Unlike so many of their religious leaders, Bonhoeffer’s opposition to the Nazis was unremitting and he paid for it with his life. He was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler and was executed in the last weeks of the war.
But what relevance does he have for non-Germans in the 21st century?
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has no doubt of the theologian’s importance. He has travelled to Germany and Poland to attend celebrations to mark the 100th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s birth.
Listen (5m 22s)
And two items previewing General Synod debates this week.
Rural churches
Perhaps next Tuesday afternoon’s debate at the General Synod should be held not in the chamber of Church House in Westminster but in a draughty parish hall in a remote country village. They’ll be talking about rural churches – something we might take for granted, but which in many places are facing crisis – just like every other kind of rural service. The synod debate follows an internal report on rural churches which often lose out on grants from government and other funding agencies.
Listen (6m 32s)
Slave trade
Next year will see the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Colonies and next week’s General Synod will debate a motion calling on the Church to help mark the anniversary and use it as an opportunity to campaign for an end to human trafficking and other modern forms of slavery. But an amendment to the motion will also be tabled. It will call on the Church of England to recognise the damage done by its own involvement in the Slave Trade. It will also urge the Church to address the legacy of the slave trade and offer an apology to the heirs of those who were enslaved.
Listen (4m 11s)
0 Commentsweekend reading
Editorial comment on the British government’s defeat over the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill is found in both the Church Times and the Tablet.
The Guardian discusses the papal encyclical in a Face to Faith column by Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet. More about this topic is found in The Tablet itself in this article by Robert Mickens. There’s also a piece in the Telegraph by Christopher Howse.
The Times considers Dietrich Bonhoeffer in an article by Stephen Plant and in an extract from (with broken link to) the speech given in Poland yesterday by Rowan Williams.
0 CommentsGeneral Synod: Questions
The Questions to be asked have now been published, as noted in our Synod Papers item (which contains links to all documents for this group of sessions bar one item, GS 1601, which has still not been made available electronically).
The original .rtf Questions file is on the CofE website here. An html version of this page is available here. The construction of the html version took me approximately 90 seconds and required no technical skill.
Question 62 is a Question about the November Answers. I have been asking the same question of the synod office ever since November and I have never had any reply to my queries, so I will be really interested in the answer.
The Answers session is at the end of Thursday next week.
1 Commentwomen bishops: the opponents rally
Updated Friday
In the Church of England Newspaper there is an article listing Roger Beckwith, Wallace Benn, Gerald Bray and Mike Ovey as contributors, which sets out Why evangelicals are unhappy with the Guildford proposals.
And another article in the CEN reports on the Forward in Faith rally last Saturday: Church is treating us like children says bishop and Bishop Lindsay Urwin wrote in his local newspaper that Women bishops – compromise ‘won’t solve problem’.
Detailed reports from the FiF rally are to be found here, and here.
Update The Church Times has an extensive report by Glyn Paflin on the FiF event: Catholics will take TEA if it’s ‘fairtrade’.
11 Commentscivil partnerships: Ecclesiastical Law Journal article
The Ecclesiastical Law Journal is published by the Ecclesiastical Law Society. The January issue contains an article entitled The Civil Partnership Act 2004, Same-Sex Marriage and the Church of England by Jacqueline Humphreys, Barrister.
The Editor of the Journal, Mark Hill, has given his permission for this copyrighted article to be reproduced by Thinking Anglicans, and you can read it in full here.
In an editorial in the magazine, Chancellor Hill comments on the article as follows:
Jacky Humphreys offers a detailed critique of the Civil Partnership Act. The Act will have a profound effect on our collective understanding of society. Her article merits thoughtful reflection. I have the misfortune of differing from her in one minor but significant respect. I do not consider that the existence of a civil partnership carries with it by implication the inference that it is a sexual union. Far from it — the partnership is financial in nature dealing with joint ownership of possessions and rights of inheritance. I would therefore consider any enquiry of a civil partner into the nature of his or her partnership to be unacceptably intrusive and a breach of the right to respect for one’s private and family life.
It seems pretty clear that the House of Bishops Pastoral Statment accepted Chancellor Hill’s view that a CP is not necessarily a sexual relationship. It is to be hoped that all bishops will also heed his view of the Human Rights consequences that follow from such a position.
The section of the article to which Chancellor Hill’s comment relates can be found here. However, it pays to read the whole article right through.
Following a detailed comparison of Marriage and Civil Partnership, the author concludes that:
In my view, the 2004 Act has an understanding of civil partnerships that are voluntary, permanent, sexual, monogamous, potentially mutually supportive and potentially nurturing of children in the same ways that a marriage is understood to be within English law. A civil partnership is probably also understood as requiring sexual fidelity in the same way marriage does, although confirmation of this will only be obtained once judicial implementation of the provision takes place. In these ways then, civil partnerships are conceptually the same as marriage.
The key conceptual difference between civil partnerships and marriage is that one is essentially same-sex and the other is essentially opposite-sex, with the corollary that children cannot be conceived naturally by the partners. There are some practical differences in law relating directly to that physiological difference, namely the absence of provision regarding non-consummation and adultery and, in the usual run of things, the conception of children. Therefore whether it is correct to regard civil partnerships as same-sex marriage depends on whether one regards those aspects of marriage that are the same as civil partnerships—voluntary, permanent, sexual, monogamous, mutually supportive, nurturing of children and probably sexually faithful—as more or less vital to the definition of marriage than the key difference, which is the sex of the persons entering the status. Is heterosexuality the essential conceptual component of marriage, or is the term ‘marriage’ in danger of becoming cheapened by this narrow focus on the gender of the participants?
The third part of the article deals with several specific practical issues: Clergy Discipline and Employment, Occasional Offices, Blessing Services, and the Admission to Communion of Notorious Offenders.
Her concluding section is reproduced below the fold.
39 Comments