WOMEN PRIESTS

Southland Times, Issue 20447, 27 March 1928, Page 5

WOMEN PRIESTS

BISHOP’S OPINION ORDINATION NOT FAVOURED USEFULNESS IN OTHER SPHERES (By Telegraph—Press Assn—Copyright.) 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 has brought about a crisis in the Anglican Church resulting in church schools having disappeared in most parishes. Assistant curates are rapidly going, incumbents are ceasing to be, and parish priests are becoming ministers to such congregations as they can gather. A generation is growing up in the industrial districts not possessing the elements of the 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 recognition of women’s distinctiveness in natural functions which cannot .be ignored. The spiritual achievements of individual women, past and present, do not justify such departure •from Christ’s institutions and a breach of Christendom’s traditions as the admission of women to holy orders in equality with men. The most menacing modern evil is repudiation of woman’s wifely and motherly functions largely due to the multitude of single women' who in consequence of the war are unable to marry and are therefore reeking alternatives. This repudiation is dictated by a perverted notion of sexual equality made possible by the misapplication of science and it implies disintegration of the family and elimination of the principal discipline in which citizenship is divinely ordained: To develop this deliberate, shameless, actively propagandist abuse constitutes a challenge the churches dare not ignore.”—A. and N.Z.