The Church of England’s House of Bishops met to discuss the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) project yesterday: that is, the project to change the rules about blessings of single-sex relationships so as to allow stand-alone services (such blessings being currently permitted only as an incidental part of some other service) and, additionally, to eventually open the door to priests being able to enter into single-sex civil unions.
At yesterday’s meeting the bishops, as expected – although much to the fury of LGBT campaigners – confirmed their decision made in October to mothball the project. Though their precise formal statement has been left until after Christmas, it is now clear that LLF will not proceed in the near future.
Many thinking Anglicans will rejoice. Even in the absence of personal qualms about the morality of gay relationships, LLF would have sat very awkwardly indeed with the (officially unchanged) existing doctrine of heterosexual marriage, which broadly remains that sex in it is all right and intimacy outside it undesirable. Believing six impossible things before breakfast, like the Red Queen, might have seemed easy by comparison.
Look more closely, however, and the prospects are less comforting. For one thing, the shelving of LLF was not so much whole-hearted as forced by circumstance. The problem was canon law: the bishops had, it seems clear, been advised that there were strong legal arguments that this change could only be brought in under Canon B2, which would have demanded an as yet unavailable two-thirds majority in each house of Synod.
That pressure remains, and stays strong. A clear majority of bishops, including the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, have little time for the Church’s present attitude and are seriously impatient to change it: the fact that many of their congregations are a good deal more sceptical cuts little ice. Typical was the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, who during the discussions yesterday went online to lay down the line to the Geordie faithful. She called unapologetically for, as she put it, ‘full inclusion for LGBTQI+ people’ and an end to ‘the erosion of the witness of real lives and a disregard for the fear and distress our LGBTQI+ siblings live with’.
Read it all in The Spectator Australia