Part of the One Church?

The ordination of women and Anglican identity

Roger Greenacre

• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848256279
• eBook ISBN: 9781848256293
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Offers a classical understanding of the Church of England's identity and its place as part of the wider Church. It explores the theological principles behind Anglo-Catholic views of the ordination of women, articulating with creative courtesy the theological and ecclesiological reasoning why so many cannot accept it.

Part of the
One Church?

The Ordination of Women
and Anglican Identity

Roger Greenacre

Edited by

Colin Podmore

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Geoffrey Rowell

Introduction by Colin Podmore

Part 1 An Open Letter

1 An Open Letter to Bishop Christopher Hill

Part 2 Before

2 The Ordination of Women: What is at Stake? Letter to The Times

3 Christian Unity and the Ordination of Women: A Statement to the Lough borough Conference

4 Anglicanism and Confessional Identity

5 Prestige and Patrimony

6 The Bishop as Icon of Christ

7 Lost in the Fog: An Open Letter to Fr Jean Tillard

8 Diversity in Unity: A Problem for Anglicans

9 Hope for Catholic Anglicans: An Unpublished Letter to The Times

10 Subsidiarity

11 An Amber Light: Speech in the Convocation of Canterbury

Part 3 After

12 The Advent Hope: A Sermon on the First Sunday of Advent

13 Epistola ad Romanos: An Open Letter to some Roman Catholic Friends

14 The Place of Reception: An Open Letter to the Archbishop of York

15 The Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod: Speech in the General Synod

16 To Move or to Stay?

17 Uncomfortable Truths: A Response to Edward Yarnold’s Heenan Memorial Lecture

18 The Communion Between and Within Our Churches: The Anglican Experience of its Fragility

19 The Need for Roots in the Apostolic Faith: Letter to the Church Times

20 Difference, Divergence and Division: Sermon at Evensong for the Glastonbury Pilgrimage

21 Snakes and Ladders: A Threat to Church Unity

22 Rome and Canterbury: Two Dysfunctional Ecclesiologies

Part 4 The Gift of Authority

23 A Second Chance or a Last Chance?

24 The Gift of Authority: An ARCIC Perspective

25 Ecumenism and future relations with the Roman Catholic Church

Index

Acknowledgements

The cover photograph is used with permission of the Pontifcal Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity.

An extract from the transcript by Fr Patrice Mahieu of his conversation with Roger Greenacre on 19 March 2010 is included in the Introduction by kind permission of Fr Mahieu.

Chapter 4 was first published in One in Christ, 21 (1985) and is reproduced by kind permission of the Editor.

Chapter 5 was first published in The Messenger of the Catholic League, 229 (May 1986) and is reproduced by kind permission of the General Secretary of the Catholic League.

The Open Letter republished in Chapter 7 was first published in the booklet Lost in the Fog? The Lesson for Ecumenism of Lambeth 1988, the text of which is copyright © The Church Union 1989. It is reproduced by kind permission of the Chairman of the Church Union.

Chapter 8, a lecture given at the Centro Pro Unione, Rome, on 2 May 1990, was first published in the Bulletin ‘Centro Pro Unione’, 39 (Spring 1991), 4–10. The Centro Pro Unione is a ministry of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement. Published with permission.

The speech which forms Chapter 11 was first published in the Chronicle of the Convocation of Canterbury (July 1992) and is reproduced by kind permission of the Synodical Secretary of the Convocation.

Chapter 13 and the articles which form Chapter 17 were first published in The Month in March 1993 and February 1995. They are reproduced with the permission of The Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes.

The article republished in Chapter 14 was first published in the Church of England Newspaper for 8 October 1993 and is reproduced by kind permission of the Editor.

The speech which forms Chapter 15 was first published in the Report of Proceedings of the General Synod (November 1993).

Chapter 18 is an English translation of an article first published in French in Unité des Chrétiens, 99 (July 1995) and is included by kind permission of the Editor in Chief.

The letter included in Chapter 19 was first published in the Church Times on 3 November 1995. It is reproduced with gratitude to the Church Times.

Chapter 20 was first published in The Server, 17, no. 11 (Autumn 1997) and is reproduced by kind permission of the Secretary-General of the Guild of the Servants of the Sanctuary.

Chapter 23 was first published in New Directions in July 1999 and is reproduced with permission.

The Editor is indebted to Roger Greenacre’s friend and executor Canon Jeremy Haselock for his encouragement and judicious editorial advice.

Foreword
by Geoffrey Rowell

It is a privilege to be asked to contribute a Foreword to this significant collection of papers by the late Canon Roger Greenacre.

Roger and I first came to know each other when we worked together on the Church Union Theological Committee, which was the context of some of the papers published here, as well as being responsible for two symposia on sacramental theology, Confession and Absolution (1990) and The Oil of Gladness: Anointing in the Church (1993). When I was appointed to a Wiccamical Prebend of Chichester Cathedral – one of four canonries founded by Bishop Robert Sherburn ‘to increase the learning of the Chapter’, it was good to be part of the General Chapter of the Cathedral of which Roger was Canon Chancellor. Like so many others I profited from his gift of friendship, shown in his generous hospitality. When I became Bishop in Europe, I was delighted to find Roger, having retired from his Chichester canonry, serving as Chaplain of Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur. This had brought him back to his beloved France, and enabled him to have a significant pastoral and ecumenical ministry far beyond the three years which were initially envisaged.

We owe Dr Colin Podmore, as Roger Greenacre’s literary executor, a great debt for gathering these papers together, ordering them, and preparing them for publication. As his introduction to this collection makes clear, the ordination of women to the priesthood – and even more the ordination of women to the episcopate – raises sharp and significant questions about Anglican identity, and it is important that these questions are properly understood, both by Anglicans in the Catholic tradition and more widely. Underlying differences of ecclesiology, largely unacknowledged, can mean that those holding different positions on the presenting issue can be like ships that pass in the night.

As is made clear time and again in these papers, Roger was not an impossibilist in the matter of the ordination of women, but he was rightly concerned about the authority of the Church of England (or indeed the Anglican Communion) to make a change in the historic apostolic ministry of the Church, which Anglicans claim to share with the historic churches of Christendom both East and West, without greater ecumenical consensus and without a clearly articulated theology of development.

These papers are written always with a properly challenging yet creative courtesy, and at times an inevitable sadness as Roger reflects on the ecumenical consequences of a unilateral decision. Their clarity will surely assist those who are concerned that there are real questions about these issues which still have to be asked. For those for whom this is unfamiliar and even puzzling territory, given the new situation in which the Church of England finds itself, they should serve as a reminder that there is a wider context in which questions of faith and order must be asked and answered than the parochialism of the English context. We are, after all, as the Declaration of Assent puts it, only ‘part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’.

✠ Geoffrey Gibraltar:

The Rt Revd Dr Geoffrey Rowell

Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe, 2001–13

Feast of St Augustine of Hippo, 2013

Introduction
by Colin Podmore

In the articles and addresses that make up this book Canon Roger Greenacre presents – to Anglicans and to ecumenical partners – a classical understanding of the Church of England’s identity and its place within the Church Catholic. The ecclesiological and ecumenical issues that he addresses are not just relevant to the debate on women’s ordination but have much broader significance. They include issues of unity and diversity, of ‘uniatism’ and of ‘Anglican patrimony’; of the relationship between the local and the universal, and the distinction between independence and interdependence; of ‘reception’, and of decision-making in a divided Church. The frame of reference is wide: Roger’s thinking and writing were informed both by the Anglican tradition (and especially the seventeenth-century Caroline Divines) and by the French Catholic tradition with which he was so familiar; by the thought ...

Table of contents

• Part of the One Church?