CHURCH OFFICES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20106, 27 March 1928, Page 7

CHURCH OFFICES

NO PLACE FOR WOMEN Bishop of Durham Believes Striking Speech EVILS OF MODERN THOUGHT (By Telegraph—Per Press Assn.—Copyright.) (A.P.A.-tSun) LONDON, March 25. 4 ‘ The world to-day needs the faithful fulfilment of women’t 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. 4 ‘The enormous decrease in ordination candidates has brought about a crisis in the Anglican Church, resulting in church schools having disappeared in most of the parishes/’ he said. “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 that the crisis can be met by women priests. There is no assumption of female inferiority in their exclusion from holy ordc: but only a recognition of . oman’s distinctiveness in natural functions which cannot be ignored. The spiritual achievements of individual women, past and present, do not justify such a departure from Christ’s institutions and breach of Christendom’s traditions as the admission of women to holy orders in equality with men. “The worst menacing modern evil is the repudiation of woman’s wifely and motherly functions, largely due to the multitude of single women, who in consequence of the war are unanle to marry and are therefore seeking alternatives. This repudiation, dictated by the perverted notion of sexual equality and made possible by the misapplication of science, implies disintegration of the family and elimination of the principal discipline in which citizenship is divinely ondained to develop. This deliberate, shameless, and actively propagandist abuse constitutes a challenge which the churches dare not ignore.”