It was forty years ago that I walked into an Anglican Communion service in Canada and encountered my first Anglican woman priest in the liturgy. I was rather excited. I was not long out of Anglican theological college and no one had quite understood what the fuss was all about. The issue about priesthood had been presented very simply and simplistically: “If men can, why can’t women?”.
My experience that day was both powerful and strange. I found myself experiencing a severe and incomprehensible clash between rationality and intuition, head against heart, that was going to act as a commentary on the future of both Church and society.
In fact it has taken me forty years to understand the implications of that moment and to “join the dots”.
Even now, very few find themselves able to join up the dots between the desire of the Church to reach out to placate a secular progressive culture, and what appears to be the paradoxical sexual depravity combined with a degree of social control and exclusion exercised against Christians and traditionalists in general.
Depravity may seem a harsh word to use. But Pride processions in particular seem to celebrate pushing the boundaries of sexual deviancy to new limits. This June, “Pride Month”, the latest Pride celebration in New York saw a crowd of “Alphabet people”, comprising of bare-breasted topless drag queens, shouting with jubilation: “we’re here, we’re queer and we are coming for your children”. Meanwhile, on the other side of America in Seattle, the Pride procession comprised of hordes of naked cyclists exhibiting their genitalia joyfully in front captive children.
We are entitled to ask if there is a connection between this aggressive sexualised culture and our embarking on an act of cultural synthesis with a sub or anti-Christian culture by means of the process of Synodality. The question we should ask is whether Synodality appears to have the energy to convert secular culture to the faith, or whether the priorities of secular culture subvert the faith and change it.
Given what has been happening in the UK in the arena of sex education as we discover primary school children being taught about masturbation in sex education classes, we will never be able to say that “they” made any secret that the progressive project was ultimately about the sexualisation of our children. The New York gay sloganeers were telling the truth.
But what does that have to do with the Anglican Canadian priestess?
The Church is faced with a dilemma. How should it react to secular progressive culture? Can it learn from it to evangelise without being captured by and changed by it?
The answer that the experience the Protestant churches demonstrates is that they have seriously underestimated the force and ambition of progressive culture. A movement they took to be simply about fairness has turned out not to be metaphysically or theologically neutral after all.
What has alarmed so many Catholics is that the Synodal process and its latest expression, Instrumentum Laboris, appears, knowingly or unknowingly, to be directing the Catholic Church along the same trajectory and towards the same results as the Protestant Churches have been taken.
One of the strangest phenomena attached to the Synodal process is the lack of commentary on the capitulation of Protestantism to what has turned out to be an anti-Christian social movement. The Anglican Church has increasingly adopted the moral and philosophical values of the new turbo-charged left-leaning secularism, but the disastrous heterodox consequences don’t seem to have made much impact on Catholics as the Synodal process embarks on a journey in the same direction.
Once again, the tenor of the ideology and language draws from the culture of therapy, but instead the language is now a more sophisticated mixture of the therapeutic and the political.
The offer and process of accompaniment and the “reaching out” to the margins to hear the stories and truths from feminism and those of alternative sexual orientations has led to a surrender to a different philosophy and what has turned out to be a different religion.
Which brings me back to my first encounter with the priestess behind the altar.
It was an odd and disturbing experience. Rationally and superficially I was delighted. “At last,” I thought, “I can see and judge what all the fuss is about. Here we go.”
Liturgically, all went very well. She led the office competently, read the Scriptures, preached a little homily, offered some intercessions, and I found myself saying, “what’s wrong with any of this?”
And then she moved behind the altar as celebrant and the best way I can describe what happened was to say that my stomach tipped upside down and I felt something like vertigo and severe indigestion. I experienced a conflict between mind and heart, rationality and instinct, profane and holy.
My mind was deeply offended. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked myself. “Is my unconscious secretly misogynist? If not, behave then. Either explain yourself and or stop all that.”
One of the problems of being composite mixtures of the conscious and unconscious as human beings is that the unconscious or instinctive can’t use rational language. And so it is very difficult for the mind to get a sense of what is going on when something goes wrong. It can hear the alarm bells, but it doesn’t know why they are ringing.
But this odd disturbance framed the tensions of what was to follow as the Church grappled with the demands and assumptions of feminism.
There isn’t space here for more than a few brief reflections. But perhaps one of the first ones ought to be the fact that the language we choose to express ourselves or analyse our judgment in will in part determine our conclusions. Which takes us of course to the language and process of Synodality.
The language of Synodality uses a particular tone of voice and language of encounter, drawn mainly from the culture of what we might call psycho-politics.
“Accompaniment” and the “integration of the alienated” is a mixture of the preoccupations and priorities of psychotherapy, and Marxist analysis and prescription. “Accompaniment” echoes the non-judgmental and non-directive ethos of Rogerian (for example) counselling. The recognition and empowering of the outsider, while having faint echoes in the concerns of the Prophets, is a mainstay of the redistribution of power relations of left-wing progressive politics.
In fact the ordination of women in Protestantism proved to be both a cause and a symptom of the secularisation of the faith in the West.
Put at its simplest, the women who were ordained were feminists. The women in the West of the last three generations have been immersed in it through both culture and education.
Although feminism is complex, and has now reached its fourth wave of sophisticated development, it always contained certain integral features.
It was committed to philosophical relativism. Mirroring the mantra that men and women were interchangeable, this was accompanied by a world-view that suggested all views were as good as each other. This played a powerful role in undermining the absolutist claims of Christianity and the Church. It’s preference for universalism made any exercise of the gift of discernment, the distinguishing between good and evil, almost impossible.
Neither therapy nor the secular preference for blaming evil on sociological disadvantages allowed for a recognition of metaphysical evil.
There has long been an allegiance between feminism and homosexual political and ethical rehabilitation. So it ought to be no surprise that the cause of the ordination of women goes hand in hand with the normalization of homosexual identity, culture and marriage. Listening and accompanying can only have the effect of restraining critique and theological and metaphysical analysis. It does this by promoting an exchange of philosophical category. Holiness is exchanged for psychological healing and political utopianism. The categories of the judgement of the Church, rooted in Scripture and Tradition, becomes an expression of oppression and injustice. All this is achieved simply by making accompaniment, listening and non-judgmentalism the language of encounter and assessment.
In other words, the language of the enquiry determines the content of the outcome.
How has that affected the latest document that the Synodal process has generated for us to examine and think about, Instrumentum Laboris?
In our next article we will examine what it is offering to the Church as a prescription for making our way into a refreshed future.
(The Right Reverend Kay Goldsworthy with The Most Reverend Roger Herft Archbishop of Perth at the consecration service for her Ordination as Australia’s first Anglican bishop at St George’s Cathedral on May 22, 2008 in Perth, Australia. 51-year old Archdeacon Goldsworthy was one of the first women to be ordained within the Anglican Church in 1992 when she was consecrated as a Priest. (Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images)
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