General Synod: Wednesday
This morning’s business is reported on the CofE website:
General Synod – Summary of Business Conducted Wednesday 8th February am.
This includes a full audio record of the Questions about the Octavia Hill Estates including the supplementary questions and answers. The text of Andreas Whittam Smith’s written answers is below the fold.
In his supplementary answers, he referred to the Oxford judgement. That can be read in full here (PDF format)
Press Association
Martha Linden Church Commissioners reject housing sale criticism
Church of England Newspaper
Jonathan Wynne-Jones and Matt Cresswell Bishop says property sale will affect Church’s mission
The CEN has placed these Synod stories from yesterday online:
Rural discrimination claim
Synod plea for stronger Christian ethos in Church colleges
Convergence revealed in conversations with Baptists
The official report of the afternoon’s business is here:General Synod – Summary of Business Conducted on Wednesday 8th February pm
When noting the voting figures given, it may help to remember that the total membership of the synod is 466.
Associated Press Church of England to apologize for role in slave trade
BBC Church apologises for slave trade
ekklesia Church of England apologises for part in slave trade
press reports of Tuesday's debates
Guardian Stephen Bates
Synod opens debate on women bishops
Telegraph Jonathan Petre
General Synod tries to smooth path for first woman bishop
Press Association Compromise over women bishops ‘discriminatory’
Church Times Synod Roundup
And, Alastair Cutting is blogging from the synod.
Update
Some other press coverage of the Caterpillar matter:
Jerusalem Post George Conger Lord Carey ‘ashamed to be an Anglican’
Haaretz Anglican Church in Britain decides to divest
Palestine News Agency UK Campaigners Welcome Church of England Divestment Vote on Caterpillar
ekklesia C of E’s disinvestment vote increases risk for arms dealers say campaigners
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 CommentsGeneral Synod: CT on women bishops
Last week, the Church Times had extensive coverage of the report of the Women Bishops Group.
Guildford report proposes TEA and sympathy Glyn Paflin
Contemplating a woman at Canterbury (an extract from the report)
This is how the plans could work by Christopher Hill Bishop of Guildford
Surprise, surprise: a middle way editorial comment
Saturday reading
In The Times Geoffrey Rowell discusses The dangers of unbalancing the ‘broad church’ of Anglicanism.
Paul Oestreicher writes in the Guardian about how both sides committed atrocities in WW2: Face to Faith. Related to this is the piece in The Times by Rabbi William Wolff on Nazi sites in Germany, Germany must not neglect its terrible past. Rowan Williams issued this statement on Holocaust Day.
This week also saw a major Lambeth initiative:Inaugural meeting of the Christian-Muslim Forum.
Returning to Saturday newspapers, we have a few surprising items. The Telegraph has an article arguing that Intelligent design is not creationism and Christopher Howse discusses a new book about Rome in Pagan Rome’s son of God.
Addition for another article on Intelligent Design, see How to probe the science of creation by Keith Ward from last week’s Church Times.
The Guardian has this rather odd piece by John Crace Who’d be a vicar?
For those who want to read comment on this week’s papal encyclical, there is an editorial and another article in The Tablet and beliefnet has a useful overview here.
10 CommentsNigeria: more coverage
The move by the Nigerian government which the Anglican Church there openly supports, to increase the criminal penalties for homosexuals and for their supporters, has received further coverage:
Church Times Giles Fraser Would you walk from a lynching?
The link on the CT websiteto the US State Department report on Nigerian human rights practices is incorrect at the time of writing and should really be this one.
Also both Mark Harris and Fr Jake have discussed this:
The Voice of Shame and the Shame of Silence:
Why Listen When We Can Beat, Defame and Incarcerate?
Mark has a broken link too, the Sun newspaper article to which he refers is this one.
Here’s a roundup of African comments from Sokari Ekine at Black Looks.
10 Commentselections to Archbishops' Council
The results of the clergy elections for the Archbishops’ Council have been announced:
Archbishops’ Council: Clergy members elected.
This completes the current round of elections to the Council; a complete list of members can be found here.
0 CommentsAffirming Catholicism publishes CP booklet
Affirming Catholicism is publishing a booklet about Civil Partnerships. The press release is reproduced below. The full text of the Foreword to the booklet is below the fold.
PRESS RELEASE
Affirming Catholicism welcomes civil partnerships as pastoral opportunity for Church
The Anglican organisation Affirming Catholicism will publish today, 27 January 2006, a booklet calling on the Church to welcome civil partnerships as a pastoral opportunity and a means of listening to the experience of lesbian and gay Christians.
In a foreword to the booklet, the Very Rev’d Dr Jeffrey John, the Dean of St Albans, thanks God for the legislation which came into effect in England and Wales on 21 December 2005. He says that same-sex couples who commit their lives to each other ‘are expressing the deepest and most godlike instinct in human nature’. Acknowledging that many in the Church have yet to recognise this, he nonetheless believes that civil partnerships will help to change attitudes:
‘We know that the road to full and equal acceptance of gay relationships throughout the world will be long and hard, but we can rejoice that in this country the partnership law is a very big step along it.’
The booklet, written by the Rev’d Jonathan Sedgwick, an Anglican priest, argues that civil partnerships will provide a way out of the ‘catch 22’ which faces many gay Christians whose relationships are criticised for being unstable while – at the same time – the Church fails to offer any support which might help couples stay together. The argument is backed up by real-life case studies of lesbian and gay christian couples. Canon Nerissa Jones, MBE, the Chair of Trustees said:
‘The period of listening and reception to which Anglicans are committed can’t happen on a purely theoretical level. It must also be about the lived experience of lesbian and gay Christians who need to feel safe enough to tell their stories. We believe that civil partnership can help give that security and that local clergy should offer prayer and support for couples.’
The policy of the Church of England, as stated by the House of Bishops is that, while there could be no authorised liturgy to bless same-sex couples until there was consensus on Church teaching, parish priests should nonetheless respond sensitively and pastorally to gay couples seeking blessings.
The publication calls for an end to the double standard at the heart of current Church teaching which accepts gay relationships between lay people but bans sexually active homosexual women and men from the priesthood.
Copies of Civil Partnership: A Guide for Christians, by Jonathan Sedgwick, foreword by Jeffrey John, (Affirming Catholicism, London) are available by mail order: tel 020 7222 5166 or email administrator@affirmingcatholicism.org.uk priced £3.
Ends
Notes for editors
- Dr Jeffrey John’s booklet ‘Permanent, Faithful, Stable: Christian Same-Sex partnerships’ was published by Affirming Catholicism in 1993 and updated in 2001. It placed biblical teaching on homosexuality in its historical context and called for contemporary Church practice to develop and accord loving, committed and sexually faithful same-sex relationships the same value and significance as Christian marriage.
- For further information contact: The Rev’d Richard Jenkins Director Affirming Catholicism Tel 020 7233 0235 Mob 07725 341 025
Update See mention of this in Ruth Gledhill’s blog today
8 Commentscivil partnerships: Bishop of Bangor responds
The Bishop of Bangor, Anthony Crockett, has responded, in very strong terms, to the recent Fulcrum article by Andrew Goddard, The Bishops of the Church in Wales on Civil Partnerships: A Personal Response.
The bishop’s response is here. It starts out:
Your article The Bishops of the Church in Wales on Civil Partnerships: A Personal Response by Andrew Goddard in Fulcrum appears to be an interesting case of party zeal clouding judgement. It looks like yet another example of the inability of some either to listen to argument or to reject all forms of stigmatisation and to commit oneself to listen to people whose sexual orientation may be different from one’s own. I confess, too, to being puzzled by what seems – but surely cannot be – a lack of knowledge on Dr Goddard’s part of the history of the development of ethical teaching in the Christian Church.
The statements referred to in this exchange are:
The Bishops of the Church in Wales issue statement on homosexuality
The Bishops of the Church in Wales issue statement on Civil Partnerships
civil partnerships: Clifford Longley's view
Clifford Longley recently wrote a column in The Tablet which was headed with this pullquote:
Love is always good, said Cardinal Hume, including love of the same sex.
The column is about civil partnerships and how the church should deal with them.
Although Mr Longley is a Roman Catholic and is writing for a Roman Catholic journal, the article may be of interest to Anglican readers. The Tablet has kindly given TA permission to republish the article. The full text is below the fold.
8 CommentsBishop of London's well-earned sabbatical
Updated Tuesday morning
The Sunday Times carried this report by Christopher Morgan yesterday: The bishop will be away this Easter…. The Times this morning carried a further report (not by their Religious Affairs correspondent) headlined Where will you find a bishop this Easter? A: In church B: On board a luxury liner.
The fact is that the bishop is having long overdue sabbatical leave, and for this reason would in any case have been absent this Easter. The text of his note today to London clergy appears below.
Stephen Bates in the Guardian reported this matter in a more balanced way in Clerics back bishop taking Easter cruise
Extract from Richard Chartres email to London clergy
…Sabbatical
You may have seen that the Sunday Times has very kindly advertised the fact of my sabbatical. This is the first in 33 years of ministry and ten years in London and I think I owe it to everyone else to retreat and go away for a while.
Unfortunately, because I am responsible for many things on the General Synod agenda, I cannot begin my sabbatical until February 13. I shall be away for just over two months, returning to duty on 24 April. I am very grateful to colleagues who will deputise for me during the period.
The Senior bishop, the Bishop of Kensington, will be officiating at the Easter Vigil in the Cathedral. I hope I have not left too much to burden very busy people excessively.
This week I am going to the Conference of European Churches in Rome with the Cardinal to participate in the planning of the third European Ecumenical Assembly. After the success of the great grassroots assemblies in Basle and Graz, the third is planned for Sibiu in September 2007. They happen about every ten years and give an opportunity for Christians of all confessions to pray together for Christian witness in Europe….
Tuesday Updates
Ruth Gledhill in The Times Holy sea: Richard Chartres
Tim de Lisle Guardian Vicars of the world, unite
reading for this weekend
From the Guardian’s Face to Faith column: Martyn Percy writes about Anglican diversity.
In The Times William Taylor of St Ethelburga’s Centre asks How do Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders work together to sort out hate crimes? in Honesty will help to prevent acts which bring shame on the community.
Christopher Howse writes in the Telegraph about psychoanalysis and religion in Sharing a couch with believers.
The Tablet has Keith Ward writing about the recent Richard Dawkins TV programmes in Faith, hype and a lack of clarity.
The Tablet also has a review by Owen Gingerich of Exploring Reality: the intertwining of science and religion by John Polkinghorne in Evolving, unfolding world.
1 Comment