The Belfast Newsletter reported this week:
Measures paving the way for the appointment of women as bishops in the Church of England have received royal assent from the Queen, Speaker John Bercow has announced.
Mr Bercow told the Commons the Bishops and Priests (Consecration and Ordination of Women) Measure, agreed by both Houses of Parliament in the past week, had cleared its final legal hurdle with sign-off from the Palace.The Church of England General Synod is meeting on November 17 to formally conclude the process and women will be eligible to fill vacancies after this date.
Blogger Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, vicar of Belmont & Pittington on the outskirts of Durham, writes:
This is great news, and will enable the Church of England to choose from a much wider pool of talented and experienced candidates, which should make it much easier both to find bishops who are the right fit for each post, and to ensure that the College and House of Bishops as a whole includes a wider range of the skills, experiences and specialisms that we need as a Church.
Will there be tokenistic appointments? This is a fear that is regularly expressed – both by men and women. I think it is extremely unlikely. And this is even though the bottleneck of highly qualified and experienced women is so large that it would be possible for the next 10 or 20 appointments of bishops to all be women without it being a question of anything other than finding the right person for the job
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Read her full post here.