Word: synods
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...that it ever hears anything unpleasant. Official N.G. Church policy, issued after a 1974 synod, has dropped old racist theology in favor of nominal support for racial equality, but holds that South Africa's system of apartheid is morally acceptable. "The New Testament does not regard the diversity of peoples as such as something sinful," the policy statement says, and the teaching in Galatians 3: 28 that "there is neither Jew nor Greek" in Christ relates to overall spiritual unity, not "social integration...
...bishops were for it. The laity endorsed it too. But the rank-and-file clergy of the Church of England vehemently opposed the idea. So, as English Anglicans held their autumn General Synod in the white-domed Church House behind Westminster Abbey last week, a proposal to ordain women to the priesthood was defeated...
...worry, declared Hugh Montefiore, Bishop of Birmingham and leader of the synod camp pushing the motion. "Their culture is different from our own," he said of the U.S. "They actually enjoy confrontation and they tend to politicize where we play things down." But what of the danger that approval of women priests would rupture the fragile ecumenical bridge that the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches are building? Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan, the highest primate of the church and a proponent of women priests, sought to ease that concern by declaring of the Catholics: "I think they would welcome...
...Kroll and some 100 other Anglican women hoping to be ordained, the most frustrating news was left unsaid: by church mandate, the issue cannot be formally reconsidered until a new synod convenes in 1980?and even then, with a crushing load of other business to settle, the Anglican leaders may not consent to hear the women's case until 1983 or later...
Significantly, John Paul II emphasized "collegiality" and advocated "appropriate development" of the Synod of Bishops, now a powerless, muted body. Observers of the Polish church scene note that Wojtyla turned the meetings of Poland's bishops from a rubber stamp for Wyszynski into a collegial and more powerful voice of the church. In his own archdiocese, he sought priestly and lay involvement through an innovative "Pastoral Synod," a seven-year series of discussions on church affairs reminiscent of far more radical nationwide gatherings in Holland that were banned by the Vatican...