Catholic Church saddened by General Synod’s vote on women bishops: The Church of England Newspaper, August 6, 2010 p 6.

Bishop Brian Farrell of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity

First published in The Church of England Newspaper.

Last month’s vote by General Synod on the consecration of women bishops is a departure from the apostolic tradition of the catholic church, the secretary of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity said.  However, Bishop Brian Farrell declared the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion continued to have a duty to engage in ecumenical dialogue.

In an interview with the ZENIT news service, Bishop Farrell said would women bishops would present an “enormous obstacle” to Anglican-Catholic talks.  “All the Churches of the first millennium, Catholic, Eastern and Orthodox, state that only men can be ordained. These Churches see the ordination of women as an illegitimate abandonment of authentic Tradition.”

However, the addition of women to the episcopacy in the Anglican Churches of Canada, New Zealand, the United States and Cuba had not ended ecumenical dialogue in those countries he noted.  Any future dialogue with Anglicans “must take account of this situation, and recognize that an enormous obstacle has been created for attaining the objective of the dialogue itself, which would be total and visible ecclesial communion. The Catholic-Anglican dialogue will continue within these parameters,” Bishop Farrell said.

He added that the attempted compromise brokered by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to keep traditionalists on board, was inherently unworkable.  If General Synod had accepted the archbishops’ proposal “one would be faced with a situation in which, for example, a parish or a group could reject the authority of a woman diocesan bishop and place itself under the authority of another male bishop. Thus, that parish would not be in communion with the other parishes of its diocese. In a certain way it would be a structural schism, even if it isn’t called that.”

The Church of England’s determination to go forward with women bishops “saddens us” Bishop Farrell said as “on this point the Anglican Communion has left what we consider the essential Tradition of the Church since its beginning.”

However this “process began a long time ago,” he said, adding that the Catholic Church “will continue the ecumenical dialogue with a realism that accepts things as they are and is aware that the road ahead is long and arduous. Knowing, however, that dialogue is a task imposed by Christ himself and sustained by the grace of the Holy Spirit, soul of the Church of Christ.”