Saturday, June 09, 2007

Vatican still rejects female clergy

http://www.theeagle.com/stories/060907/faith_20070609058.php

[The Eagle] 9 June 2007--By coincidence, a potentially historic speech about women that received little media fanfare was made two weeks before America's Episcopal Church elected Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as its leader, the first female to head a branch of the international Anglican Communion.

The speaker was Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican's top official on relations with non-Catholic Christians, addressing a private session with the Church of England's bishops and certain women priests.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the 77 million Anglicans, invited Kasper to discuss the English church's projected move to allow female bishops. To date, only the United States, Canada and New Zealand have female Anglican bishops.

Official Catholic and Anglican negotiators have spent four decades working toward shared Communion and full recognition of each other's clergy and doctrine. Mincing no words, Kasper said that goal of restoring full relations "would realistically no longer exist" if Anglicanism's mother church in England consecrates female bishops.

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