The monstrous regiment of women in the Church of England

It only seems recently that the Church of England appointed its first bishopess and now they arrive not in single spies but in battalions. 

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been appointing as many women to suffragan posts as possible - four in one all women bunch this summer. The Church of England, instead of being didactic, will become therapeutic.

I am not an Anglican but what the Church of England does influences the whole of English society and, if there still is one, culture.

This article in the Spectator about the woman whom John Bercow insisted on making the first female chaplain of the House of Commons (the Rector of St Margaret's had before then always fulfilled this function), who has just been made Bishopess of Dover, makes dispiriting reading. 

'Hudson-Wilkin told an audience in Liverpool that she now refuses to take the children from her parish into St Paul’s Cathedral for confirmation because while ‘the congregation is diverse’, the clergy, she says, is something ‘completely different’. She went into her local Specsavers and harangued the management for having no photographs of black people modelling the specs,
and into M and S to complain about the lack of photos of black people wearing the bras. Last year, she was invited to be a guest speaker at a Rotary Club dinner in Dover. They didn’t much like being told off by her for their lack of diversity before she sped off back to London.

'The morning after her appointment, she was interviewed by Nick Robinson on the Today programme. She quoted a horrible instance of racist abuse she’d received since the Brexit vote: a stranger shouting at her to ‘Go back to Africa’. She also said: ‘Rose has always done it the Rose way.’ ‘I’m Caribbean. I’m Jamaican, and I’m a child of God.’ Robinson then had to remind her she was also British.'

She sounds a self-publicist in the mould of the absolutely insufferable egoist Bishop Desmond Tutu. She also sounds as if she has a huge chip on her shoulder, though it is hard to see why, bearing in mind her stellar career.

It's all a very long way from Anthony Trollope or the newly canonised St John Henry Newman.


Some would say that little can be expected from an outfit that began by hanging, drawing and quartering saints, but in an ecumenical spirit I find it very sad.