WHAT'S WRONG WITH WOMEN PRIESTS?

The new female Bishop of London Sarah Mulally - it is just a matter
of time before a woman is ordained as an Archbishop of Canterbury

I asked this question of the priest as I was leaving church recently.  I am an occasional church goer and find spending an hour a week there worthwhile even if I am not a strong believer and find the idea of an afterlife pretty unconvincing - pretty dull even. Others were waiting to say their goodbyes so there was not much time to deal with the issue properly  but his one sentence response was: “Because it mucks up our relationship with other churches.”  This is fair enough as far as it goes but it does make it seem that it is more important to be popular than to be right. It also makes the pace of change very slow.

Churches were excluded from the legislation which the UK enacted to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of gender - and presumably sexuality.  The CofE (Church of England) has adapted very slowly to the idea of having women priests and, although plenty of its vicars are known to be gay, they are not officially allowed to live in a homosexual relationship with another man, only a platonic one.  I wonder if many of them actually obey the rule not to have sex with their live-in partners for the sake of obeying the letter of the law.  If so, they have more self-control than most of us.  It is probably more a case of ‘Don’t ask, Don’t tell’.

There is certainly nothing in the Bible which definitively prohibits women from becoming priests, although there are texts which, as usual, can be interpreted differently.  (For more on women in the bible go to http://www.philosopherkings.co.uk/Womeninthebible.html)  Your interpretation usually reflects rather than decides your view.  In sport video technology is now used increasingly to decide issues which the on-field referee may not have seen clearly.  Has this stopped the arguments and led to peace breaking out?  Of course not.

One of the attractions of church, of course, is its unchanging nature. It is reassuring to go to a familiar building and join in the same type of service every week wherever you are in the world.  Indeed, in the relentless competition between churches, it is often the ones that change the least which attract the most loyal devotees, while the ones which always try to be up to the minute and relevant soon lose their appeal. 

So, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  The trouble is that the Catholic church is increasingly broken.  It is all very well Saint Paul telling the followers of Christ to refrain from sex, but the kind of dedication needed to achieve that has worn off in two thousand years.  The pressures on men to find some form of sexual gratification led to so many Catholic priests being accused of sexual abuse and a whole lot of trouble for their church.

While the Catholics cling to an increasingly untenable insistence on an undeliverable level of abstinence, the good old CofE wins gold medals at fudging the issue.  When we stand up to say the creed together after the sermon we refer to ‘the holy catholic and apostolic church” with a small ‘c’.  This makes it seem that the English church is an offshoot of the Roman one which conducts the same service but allows the priests to marry.  Once you let the wives in to become ordained as well as the husbands, you have torpedoed any hope of the two churches coming together in one body.  For many traditionalists, it is better to do without women priests than to make that final break with their capital ‘c’ Catholic cousins.

So, we have effectively two Anglican churches, one which allows women to offer the bread and blood of Christ, the other which will only allow them to read the lessons from the Bible.  I am not being cynical here.  No Archbishop of Canterbury wants to lose half his flock over the issue of female ordination (or gay priests) so both sides are accommodated within one large tent, even if they live on opposite sides of it and only occasionally nod to each other. I cannot blame him (not her yet) for keeping a lid on this particular pressure cooker.

After we have said our prayers, sung the hymns, listened to the sermon and recited the creed (which I do with a large pinch of salt nearby) we extend to each other the sign of peace, which is just a handshake with strangers.  It may not seem much but it is a way of saying that we are all equal in the eyes of God, that the size of your bank balance (or your ego) means nothing when you stand before the Almighty.  I may not believe in Him (or Her) very much but I have always felt this was worth doing on at least one day of the week, which I still set aside for thinking about things besides my personal ambitions and desires.

Then we go to the altar and kneel for communion.  I was slow on the uptake and did not realise for a long time that it was always a man who handed over the wafer and tipped the communion cup towards the communicants at this particular church because they had decided to stay out of the women priests' club.  Most of them are elderly white men: pale, male and stale is the less flattering way to put it. In time I suppose, they will die off and be replaced by younger priests who do not share the view that you have to be male to bring people to God. I would have no problem if this were to happen tomorrow but I will not boycott the church just because it has a purely male priesthood.  Sometimes it is better to agree to differ than to pick a fight.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is: diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

COLOUR BLIND CASTING

Ade Hastrup, black actor

I have written before on the issue of colour blind casting, arguing that racism will never be properly finished in this country until we have a white man playing Othello without anyone batting an eyelid (http://menfriday.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/black-and-white.html).  Recently I have been thinking about the issue again. largely as a result of seeing two plays and a film.

The first play was The Winslow Boy, a thoroughly old-fashioned conventional story about a family's fight for justice for their son, who is accused of stealing a postal order.  The play was fine, well-acted and involving even if the set, costumes and staging were unadventurous.  The only slight frisson was when the family solicitor Desmond appears on stage played by a black actor.  The character is a stuffy cricket-playing solicitor and the name is common enough amongst black men in Britain - as is playing cricket - so the casting would not have excited comment except that the play was set a hundred years ago in the build-up to the First World War.  (The actual character on whom the play was based died at the age of nineteen in the trenches.)  Fair enough, however, we seemed to think in the audience.  It is an well-known play by Terence Rattigan who is coming back into fashion, black actors need opportunities and you can suspend your disbelief enough to accept this piece of casting, even if in practice a black man would not have become a family solicitor a hundred years ago.

Second up was Queen Anne, set three hundred years ago about the relationship of Anne and Sarah Churchill, which had been central to the power balance in Britain but then went sour.  In this play, Sarah's husband the Duke of Marlborough was played by a black actor.  While it was just about possible Desmond could have been black, history tells us that John Churchill was definitely white, wealthy and privileged.  Again, you put this fact out of your mind in watching the play.  Something about a show on the stage means you stop being pedantic about skin colour and get on with enjoying the story.

That does not work so well on film, however, where a higher standard of realism is expected.  Film-makers spend millions on computer generated special effects (CGI) which are often unconvincing and distancing.  I start to switch off when I imagine a nerd sitting at a keyboard expecting me to believe that a skyscraper is collapsing or a spaceship exploding.  Sadly this means that opportunities for black actors have to be restricted to roles they might be expected to fill in real life - or in the alternative superhero universe of Black Panther.  

The film was about the Duke's descendant Winston Churchill.  I have been a bit Churchilled out recently and was going to skip it but we went for date night and it was actually a reasonable representation of an important time.  Even the make-up which, like the CGI, is so often unconvincing worked well enough.  What did not work was the part in which 'Winnie takes the tube'.  It sounds like a Pooh story and is about as realistic.  This absurd scene ends with some lines from the historian Macauley begun by Churchill and completed by an unknown black character, who gets a pat on the back from Winnie.  Çhurchill then goes off to rouse the House of Commons and stride off in triumph as the credits start to roll.

Everything about this is wrong.  Churchill was a leader not a follower and he would not have been seen dead on the tube. He did not need the support of the common people he supposedly met there to be convinced that he was right.  Moreover, Britain simply was not a multicultural country at the time and a man of colour would not have been in the position to offer his opinions to the Prime Minister of the day. Let us give Churchill the benefit of the doubt and say that he was not an out and out racist, but he was definitely an imperialist who had no time for Indian independence, for example, and despised Gandhi.  Shoehorning a black character into an already unrealistic scene simply made it impossible to believe in.

The actor who played the unnamed black man on the tube is called Ade Hastrup and I wish him well in his career.  He faces plenty of obstacles, not least the fact that it is not easy to rewrite history.  On the stage, maybe.  On the screen, no.

This essay was written just before the Oscars ceremony - in which Oldman won for Best Actor - and so it did not cover the concept of the 'inclusion rider' which Best Actress winner Trances McDormand referenced.  This is something I will deal with in a future post.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com