If you’re a believer, thank God. If you’re not, thank Her anyway, because it’s now official that Henry VIII’s Church of England will be getting its first female bishop. The news came after an overwhelming show of hands at the church’s General Synod, in November, and provided the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal month for women’s rights—a month in which American feminists, still reeling from the strong likelihood of a fresh assault on Roe v. Wade, in January, when the Senate changes hands, read about revelations involving a noxious culture of campus rapes, including an alleged fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, that for years had gone unpunished by college administrators and were never reported to the police. (And let’s not forget the feminists in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄ?an took the podium at a women’s conference last week to declare that “women are not equal to men” and that to pretend otherwise was “against nature.”)
Americans, of course, are used to the presence of female bishops. Women in the Episcopal priesthood—the Episcopal Church being Anglicanism’s American branch—won their fight for elevation in 1989, five years before English women were even admitted to the priesthood. Since then, some twenty American women have been elected to the episcopate. One of them—Katharine Jefferts Schori—has been the Presiding Bishop (or Primate) for nearly nine years. But the vote in England may be a lot more significant than it first appears. England’s church is an “established” church, a church of state—its clergy are accountable to the state. Twenty-six of its bishops sit in the House of Lords. Its historic assets, now supplemented by diocesan assessments and pension contributions, are overseen by thirty-three commissioners, among them six ministers of state, including (ex officio) the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor, and five members nominated or appointed directly by the present Queen.
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