NO FEMALE CLERGY!

Grey River Argus, 27 March 1928, Page 5

NO FEMALE CLERGY!

I SAYS ENGLISH BISHOP Their Place the Home THE FAMILY MENACED. (Aus. & N.Z. Cable Assn & Sun Cable) LONDON, March 25. “The world to-day needs faithful fulfilment of women’s normal functions. This cannot be achieved in female priests and bishops, but in Christian wives and mothers.” said the Bishop of Durham at the Diocesan Conference. “The enormous decrease in ordination candidates.” he said, “has brought about a crisis in the Anglican Church resulting in church schools having disappeared in most parishes. Assistant curates art* rapidly going, incubents are ceasing to be, and parish priests are l> 'coming ministers to such congregations as they can gather. A generation is growing up in industrial districts not posst'ssing the genuine Christian faith. I do not believe the crisis can be met by women priests. There is.no assumption of female inferiority in their exclusion from Holy Orders: only a recognition of woman’s distinctiveness in natural funciions, which cannot be ignored. The spiritual achievements of 1 individual women, past and present, do i not justify such a departure from! Christ’s institutions and breach of' Christendom’s traditions, as the admission of women to Holy Orders in an equality with men. “Tin* most menacing mod rn evil is a repudiation of woman’s wifely and motherly functions, largely dim to the multitude of single women, who, in consequence of the war, are unable to marry and are therefore seeking alternatives. This repudiation, dictated by a perverted notion of sexual equality, made possible by a misapplication of s< iciice. implies a disintegration of the family and elimination of principal discipline in which citizenship is divinely ordained to develop. This deliberate shameless and actively propagandist abuse constitutes a challenge which the churches dare not ignore.”