Idle thought

[lethargic_man]

Women priests are the Lubavitch of the Church of England.

(Insofar as that traditional priests/rabbis are in decline or ageing except in major city communities, and it's the women priests/Lubavitch rabbis who end up occupying pulpits everywhere else. One wonders whether the attitude towards women priests is the same as that towards Lubavitch rabbis, namely, that they do a good job but it would have been preferable to have had a rabbi who came from the same world as us, that we could relate to better...)

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I think you've summed it up perfectly. Also, in the church, women are a problem because traditionally any position went to, say, a 'vicar and his wife'. And the role of 'vicar's wife' was just as well-defined as that of the vicar, and it really was a two-person job, and even today, as far as I can make out, the wife is supposed to do a considerable amount of unpaid work for the community.

Get a woman, and a full-time unpaid worker is lost, because her husband is unlikely to step into that role. I think that might just be the reason behind some of the resistance. Of course she can't do the job as well as the husband-and-wife team of old - she's only one person.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I think you've summed it up perfectly. Also, in the church, women are a problem because traditionally any position went to, say, a 'vicar and his wife'. And the role of 'vicar's wife' was just as well-defined as that of the vicar, and it really was a two-person job, and even today, as far as I can make out, the wife is supposed to do a considerable amount of unpaid work for the community.

Yeah, we've got a name for "rabbi's wife": rebbetzin. (And that's also something that vanishes when you have women rabbis—or, for that matter, women married to rabbis who want to pursue their own career path.)

Mind you, the Catholics manage without vicars wives, so the rest of us can do so too...

[liv]

I think this is a terrible comparison, because women are not remotely outsiders to the Church of England! They don't come from a different world, they don't have a completely different attitude to their religion from the men who were brought up in exactly the same communities and went through exactly the same religious education. Also, there's no organization of women aggressively proselytizing to turn men into women.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Well, it was a good analogy so long as you didn't look into it beyond first thought. ;^b

[snjstar.livejournal.com]

I think Church of England are far more likely to allow women Priests at some point then Lubavitch are to allow Women Rabbis, at least men and women can sit together in Church of England.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Firstly, the CofE already do allow women priests, as the above article points out (and besides, haven't you been following the news at all?); and secondly, whether the Lubavitch allow women rabbis is completely irrelevant to my analogy.

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

I thought the Church of England are Protestants and they always allowed women. It is just that women don't always take that high position. I know the evangelical church. They have women priests for a quite long time. I doubt that was the case when Martin Luther started it. I rather assume it came with the emanzipation. The Catholic church still does not allow women.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

No, as the article linked to says, women priests were first ordained in 1994.

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

Ok, if they talk about the Protestants here it is late. Protestantism in England existed since Henry XVIII. split from the Catholic church. They still have a Catholic flavour. Some years ago when I travelled as a tourist with a group I was drawn into a church which I assumed was a Protestant one and not an unusual English Catholic one. (Therefore I would like to be a Cohen. Can we change?)Anyway, it reminded me more of a Catholic service I was forced to go when I was in school. The Protestants in Germany do not make a cross over their chest. I know both services in Germany, Evangelical and Catholic. I mostly disliked Catholic.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Protestantism in England existed since Henry XVIII. split from the Catholic church.

Henry XVIII? Didn't he reign in the twenty-sixth century? ;^b (ITYM Henry VIII.)

They still have a Catholic flavour. Some years ago when I travelled as a tourist with a group I was drawn into a church which I assumed was a Protestant one and not an unusual English Catholic one. (Therefore I would like to be a Cohen. Can we change?)Anyway, it reminded me more of a Catholic service I was forced to go when I was in school. The Protestants in Germany do not make a cross over their chest.

Protestantism is not one movement with united practices. It's split into many different denominations, all different; and even within the Church of England there's High Anglican, which has many of the rites of Catholicism, and Low Anglicanism, which does not.