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Men, women, Jews, Greeks, Tories, Socialists, Papists and Calvinists – all are welcome to worship in our pews. The Church of England has been doing what it hates and hating what it does since 1534, perched tentatively between its Catholic and Reformed lobbies, held together in a coalition of theological confusion by a transcendent liturgy and love for an order of beauty, peace and grace. “ For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not but what I hate, that do I,” wrote St Paul to the church in Rome. Consider how we daily excuse our inconsistencies and justify our hypocrisies how we say one thing and feign another.
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You might think it awfully confused for a church to be consecrating women as bishops at the same time as consecrating men who are opposed to women bishops, but the Church of England is a human institution, and human beings have an inordinate capacity if not the innate tendency to sustain head-heart tensions and maintain mutual exclusions in the realms of morality, spirituality and theology. His consecration today as the Suffragan Bishop of Burnley in the Diocese of Blackburn is the incarnational declaration of the Church of England’s commitment to ecclesial unity it is spiritual fellowship in praxis, for there is only one holy, catholic and apostolic Church, and still we pray, as Christ Himself prayed, for its visible unity. Libby Lane made history in York Minster Philip North continues it. That’s the popular perception of your average Anglo-Catholic, infused with gin and bestrewn with lace, proceeding from St Stephen’s House, Oxford, which is still churning out priests of orthodox personality – men who love God in their hearts with the joyful desire to make Him known. Mass, Mass, Walsingham, Mass Mission, Misogyny, Mass and Mass. But it is a curious thing to witness how smilingly respectful of the liberals the traddies tend to be, and how lip-curlingly scornful of the traddies the liberals so frequently are. It is a matter of theological ontology, not a denial of gender equality. Philip North is from the Traditionalist wing of the Church, opposed to women’s ordination as priests, and even more so to their consecration as bishops. On 7th November 2014, it was announced by The Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street: “The Queen has approved the nomination of the Reverend Philip John North to the Suffragan See of Burnley.” It was filed under ‘Arts and Culture’, which, for David Cameron, is precisely where the Church of England may be neatly classified – a little way but not too far down the via media of cultural creativity and the equal society somewhere between the Royal Shakespeare Company and the campaign for superfast broadband.