The British House of Commons has voted in favor of legislation that would allow women to succeed to the throne on equal terms with men.

As the law stands now, a woman can only ascend the throne if she does not have any brothers. However, in 2011, David Cameron announced that the prime ministers of the sixteen Commonwealth Realms where Queen Elizabeth II is Head of State had agreed to let daughters inherit on an equal basis. From henceforth, the Crown would go to the eldest child, regardless of sex.

After lengthy negotiations with the various Commonwealth governments, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg introduced legislation to make the change official. But in addition to doing away with male-preference primogeniture, the Succession to the Crown Bill also makes other adjustments to the law of succession. Notably, members of the Royal Family will no longer be barred from succeeding to the Crown if they marry a Roman Catholic. Also, the requirement to seek the monarch’s consent before marrying will be limited to the first six people in the list of succession. Presently, every descendant of George II is supposed to obtain the sovereign’s permission to marry; if they fail to do so, their marriage is null and void. Under the new law, those who marry without the monarch’s consent will only forfeit their claim to the throne.

Before the Commons began their debate on the general principle behind the bill, MPs expressed frustration at the government’s proposed timetable for the law’s journey through Parliament.

“We spend hours debating the taxation of lorries and other such matters, which get a full day allocated for Second Reading, whereas the succession to the Crown is to be dealt with in a truncated Second Reading debate, a brief Committee stage, and then one day for the remaining stages,” said Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. “That seems to me to be an insult to the nation, to our sovereign and, indeed, to Parliament.”

Rees-Mogg also argued that the Commons should be able to extend the scope of the bill. He pointed out that if an heir to the throne were to marry a Roman Catholic, he or she would be expected to promise to do everything in their power to see that their children were raised in the Roman Catholic faith. But the sovereign is also Supreme Governor of the Church of England, so they cannot be members of the Roman Catholic church. Rees-Mogg maintained that, if a Roman Catholic ascended the throne, it would be best to allow an Anglican regent to handle ecclesiastical matters.

“That is an entirely logical extension of what is proposed in the Bill and time ought to be allowed to debate it, because when we start these changes and decide that in this modern age we need to be more politically correct and allow Catholics to marry into the throne, we have to consider the consequence.”

But despite the misgivings of a number of MPs, the government’s timetable was ultimately agreed to by a voice vote. Since the opposition Labour Party also backed the timetable, there would be little chance of defeating it.

During the actual debate on the bill itself, the vast majority of speakers declared their support. However, some MPs questioned the government’s decision to require the first six heirs to the throne to obtain the monarch’s consent before marrying. “I simply do not understand why the monarch would want to retain the right to forbid somebody to marry and to declare their marriage null and void because consent was not granted,” said Labour MP Chris Bryant.

“On what basis would they refuse to grant consent—because someone involved was illegitimate, not wealthy enough, a commoner or an actress?” he continued.

But Clegg defended the government’s decision, saying that it was right for the monarch to have a say in the marriages of those who were most likely to inherit the Crown. “Having been in consultation with the royal household over a prolonged period, we feel that that strikes the right balance.”

Conservative MP Ben Wallace expressed concern about the bill’s effect on the Duchy of Lancaster. He claimed that the duchy would continue to be governed by male-preference primogeniture, so a female heir to the throne might not inherit its multi-million pound property portfolio. But Clegg dismissed his concerns, saying that the bill was only concerned with succession to the Crown and Parliament could deal with the issue of other titles later.

Several MPs also voiced concern that, although the bill allowed members of the Royal Family to marry Roman Catholics, Roman Catholics would still be prohibited from ascending the throne. But given the lack of political will to disestablish the Church of England, it seems likely that the religious requirement will remain for the foreseeable future.

After giving the bill a second reading, the House immediately resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole House to discuss the bill in detail. Although several backbench MPs moved amendments based on concerns raised during the second reading debate, the only amendment that was actually passed was a minor technical change moved by the government. But MPs will have another opportunity to propose amendments during the bill’s report stage on January 28.

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After a twelve-year legislative battle, the General Synod of the Church of England has rejected a move to consecrate women bishops.

In order to pass, the legislation required a 2/3 majority in all three Houses of Synod. Although there was enough support in the House of Bishops and the House of Clergy to pass the measure, the House of Laity was just a few votes shy of the required majority. The final tally was as follows:

House of Bishops: 44 in favor, 2 against

House of Clergy: 148 in favor, 45 against

House of Laity: 132 in favor, 74 against

Earlier in the day, the Archbishop of Canterbury-designate and current Bishop of Durham, the Rt. Rev. Justin Welby, urged the Synod to support the measure. He said that the church needed to show that it could “Manage diversity of view without division – diversity in amity, not diversity in enmity.”

“We cannot get trapped into believing this is a zero sum decision where one person’s gain must be another’s loss.”

Also speaking in favor of the change, the Bishop of Liverpool, the Rt. Rev. James Jones, said that he had changed his mind on the issue. “I now believe that for the mission of God to the people of England it is right for women to take up their place in this House of Bishops sitting before you now.”

Canon Rosie Harper told the Synod that rejecting the measure would have dire consequences. “Firstly, as a Church for the whole country we will be seen to have failed to do what is right and honourable; a Church with lower moral standards than the rest of society risks its right to comment on other issues.”

“Secondly, it will inevitably be seen as the act of a dying Church more wedded to the past than committed to hope for the future.”

However, one of the Anglo-Catholic members of Synod, Canon Simon Killwick, claimed that the measure should be rejected because “it has united against it the whole spectrum of traditionalists.”

The Church of England has allowed women to become priests since 1994, but a vocal minority of Anglicans remains opposed to women in the ministry. ‘High Church’ Anglicans claim that the ordination of women flies in the face of two millennia of Catholic practice, while ‘Low Church’ Anglicans point to Bible verses that they say prohibit women from having authority over men.

When the first women were ordained, a host of measures were put in place to mollify traditionalists. Parishes that opposed the ordination of women could ban female priests from their pulpits, and they could even opt-out of their local bishop’s authority if he supported the ordination of women.

But the prospect of women bishops threatened to be even more problematic for traditionalists. Because they believe that it is theologically impossible for a woman to be a bishop, they would be unable to accept priests ordained by female bishops, even if the priests were male. And although traditionalist parishes would have been able to ask a female bishop to delegate her pastoral responsibilities to a male colleague, many were unhappy with that proposal because they believed that a female bishop would not have any authority to begin with.

In a last-minute bid to reassure traditionalists, the House of Bishops amended the proposal to include a clause stating that, not only could parishes request alternative episcopal oversight from a male bishop, that bishop would have to share their views on the ordination of women. In other words, alternative episcopal oversight could only be provided by a bishop who had not ordained women and had been ordained by a woman himself.

But this eleventh-hour compromise angered many liberals, who claimed it was tantamount to gender-based apartheid. A number of prominent liberal Synod members announced that they would vote against the entire package, claiming that it was better to delay the admission of women to the episcopate rather than admit them as second-class citizens.

Now that the measure has been defeated, supporters of female bishops will have to start the legislative process all over again. The current measure was first introduced in 2009, so it is likely that the General Synod will not be able to revisit the matter until 2015 at the earliest.

Image Courtesy : Scottgunn

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Downing Street has announced that the Bishop of Durham, the Rt. Rev. Justin Welby, is to succeed the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Dr. Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury when the latter steps down at the end of this year.

“To be nominated to this post is both astonishing and exciting,” said Bishop Welby. “It is something I never expected, and the last few weeks have been a very strange experience. It is exciting because we are at one of those rare points where the tide of events is turning, and the church nationally, including the Church of England has great opportunities to match its very great but often hidden strengths,” he continued.

Educated at Eton and Trinity College Cambridge, Bishop Welby spent eleven years working in the oil industry. By the late 80s, he had become an executive at Enterprise Oil Plc and was earning a six-figure salary. But in 1987, he decided to leave the corporate world and become an Anglican priest.

After receiving a degree in theology from Cranmer Hall in Durham, he served as a curate (assistant parish priest) at All Saints Chilvers Coton with St Mary the Virgin Astley, in Nuneaton from 1992 to 1995. In 1995, he received his own parish, St. James, Southam, and in 1996 he was also given the neighboring parish of St. Michael and All Angels, Ufton.

In 2002, he became a Canon Residentiary at Coventry Cathedral and was extensively involved in reconciliation work in Africa and the Middle East. Much of his international work focused on Nigeria, where he attempted to diffuse the conflict in the Niger Delta.

Bishop Welby left the Diocese of Coventry in 2007 in order to become Dean of Liverpool Cathedral. During his time in Liverpool, he worked tirelessly to strengthen the cathedral’s ties to the local community.

Four years later, Bishop Welby was promoted to the Bishopric of Durham. Durham is one of the preeminent dioceses in the Church of England, and its bishop is automatically entitled to a seat in the House of Lords. Although Bishop Welby has been in Durham for less than a year, he gained recognition for his contributions in Parliament, and he was appointed to the Joint Select Commission on Banking Standards. In the church’s General Synod, he worked to prevent a schism over the admission of women to the episcopate.

Bishop Welby is commonly regarded as a member of the evangelical wing of the Church of England, which tends to stress traditional interpretation of the Bible. However, at a press conference held to announce his appointment, he lent his support to the ordination of female bishops. “I will be voting in favor and join my voice to many others in urging the Synod to go forward with this change,” he said.

As one might expect given his evangelical sympathies, Bishop Welby opposes the government’s plans to legalize gay marriage, calling it a complicated issue “and not one to be handled today, off the cuff.” At the same time, he has roundly condemned prejudice and discrimination against LGBT people.

“We must have no truck with any form of homophobia in any part of the Church,” he said. “I am always averse to the language of exclusion, when what we are called to is to love in the same way as Jesus Christ loves us. Above all in the Church we need to create safe spaces for these issues to be discussed in honesty and in love.”

Bishop Welby was chosen by the Crown Nominations Commission, a church body made up of bishops, clergy, and lay people. The selection process is highly secretive, and the commission’s deliberations are not made public. Ultimately, the commission presents two candidates to the Prime Minister, who then makes a formal recommendation to the Queen. Since 2007, Downing Street has always submitted the commission’s first choice to the monarch.

The process of installing Bishop Welby in office will be complex and arcane. Once the Archbishopric of Canterbury is vacant, the Queen will order the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral to elect a new archbishop. At the same time, she will also recommend that they elect Bishop Welby. By law, the Dean and Chapter must elect the Crown’s nominee. That election will then have to be confirmed by a commission of senior bishops appointed by the Queen. From that point on, Bishop Welby will legally be Archbishop of Canterbury.

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15-year-old British schoolgirl Megan Stammers, reported missing on 21 September, was located by French authorities this Friday strolling arm in arm with lover Jeremy Forrest, her 30-year-old married math teacher. The unwitting pair were traipsing the Rue Sainte-Catherine, Bordeaux’s prime shopping district, when they were apprehended at 11:15pm French time. Their brewing, months-long romance was evidenced over Twitter, fervent text messages to one another and fellow students’ testimonies after the two had been spotted holding hands on the flight home from a school trip to Los Angeles in February.

“I just want to runaway forever,” Megan had tweeted in late June.

“Me & you Let’s just run away,” Forrest had responded. And on July 1: “I want to go everywhere with you baby; for the record you never look anything less than absolutely beautiful.”

According to the Daily Mail, Megan had used her 37-year-old mother’s passport to make the ferry crossing from the UK to France incognito. A distraught Megan was taken into protective custody; meanwhile, Mr. Forrest, an amateur musician who taught at the Bishop Bell School in Eastbourne, UK, has been arrested for “the taking of a minor against her parents’ will,” French judicial authorities confirm.

Megan’s parents rally for her return

Megan’s parents reported her missing when she failed to appear at school last Friday. As Sussex Police scoured for clues to Megan’s whereabouts, a CCTV recording surfaced showing Megan and Mr. Forrest holding hands while boarding a ferry destined from Dover to Calais at 9:20pm BST on Thursday.

“Megan was last seen wearing a white vest top and a silver necklace,” said a post on her website, www.meganstammers.com, which her panic-stricken parents had dedicated to her search. The CCTV images were released to the French Missing Persons Bureau and circulated in European media. A dedicated Twitter and Facebook account was also set up, garnering followers in the thousands. Another to-watch signpost was Forrest’s black Ford Fiesta, which the fugitive duo were said to have boarded the ferry with.

Four witnesses had reported sighting the illicit couple this week, the most recent tip-off coming 48 hours prior to their apprehension. Forrest, it was revealed, had been seeking job vacancies at bars in the days before his arrest. Aside from a single text message to a friend last Friday, informing that she and Forrest had reached France safely, Megan had remained silent in the face of her and even Forrest’s parents’ desperate appeals for them to come home. Forrest’s job-seeking further indicates that the pair had every intention of starting a new life in France as a couple.

The allegations of their hand-holding during a school trip came just three months shy of Forrest’s first wedding anniversary to wife Emily Forrest, who has kept silent regarding the debacle. On 27 September, two days before his arrest, her runaway husband updated his Facebook relationship status from “Married” to “It’s complicated”.

Though there has been no evidence of a sexual liaison, one of Megan’s peers confided to the Daily Mail: “They would always text each other. He would send her messages saying things like ‘I miss you’ and ‘I can’t wait to hug you’. She would tweet about being in love and show us his texts.”

The impact on child protection

Bishop Bell’s staff had long been cognizant of the budding teacher-pupil romance, and child protection campaigner Lucy Duckworth from the National Association for People Abused in Childhood had written the school several times, requesting to see its child protection policy. The reception, she said, was “extremely hostile.” What’s more, the school had not informed Megan’s parents of the county council’s ongoing investigations into their daughter’s relationship with a man twice her age before her disappearance.

Child protection campaigners have called for the suspension of Bishop Bell’s head teacher, Terry Boatwright, for failing to act when fellow students first reported Megan’s out-of-line relations with her math teacher. “Policies are still not in place to foster a culture where safeguarding is a priority – as it should be in any institution where adults act in loco parentis,” Duckworth told the BBC.

An unapologetic Boatwright insists, “Bishop Bell School has a robust safeguarding policy in place,” citing its “outstanding” rating by Ofsted, the UK’s official government body for school inspection.

Too relieved to leave room for fury, Megan’s birth father, Barry Wratten, 41, said in a statement, “The past week has been absolutely terrible. I’m not angry with her at all – we all do silly things when we are young without thinking about the consequences.”

Megan flew home to the UK on Saturday afternoon to her overjoyed parents.

Image Courtesy of  MeganStammers.com

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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, announced on March 16 that he will step down at the end of the year in order to take up the position of Master of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge.

Originally from Wales, Williams had a distinguished career as a professor of theology before being elected Bishop of Monmouth in the Church of Wales in 1991. In 1999, he was elected Archbishop of Wales. Three years later, he was chosen to be the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, the most senior bishop in the Church of England and the titular head of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Williams’ appointment was controversial from the start. Liberals in the church rejoiced. As a professor, he wrote an essay entitled “The Body’s Grace” that revealed his opposition to the church’s traditional teaching on homosexuality, and a series of letters written during his tenure as Archbishop of Wales revealed his belief that same-sex unions could be just as holy as heterosexual ones.

But the conservative wing of the church greeted him with suspicion, and he was snubbed by the National Evangelical Anglican Congress in 2003. They let him lead prayers, but he could not speak or preach a sermon.

But it soon became clear that, whatever his personal views on the subject of homosexuality, Williams was determined to maintain church unity at all costs. In 2003, a gay priest named Jeffrey John was chosen to be an assistant bishop in the Diocese of Oxford. Other Anglican leaders objected to John’s appointment because of his longstanding relationship with another priest, even though it was a celibate one.

Fearing the dissolution of the Anglican Communion, Williams pressured John to withdraw his candidacy, and John ultimately acquiesced. Several years later, when John was being considered for the Bishopric of Southwark, Williams is widely believed to have vetoed his candidacy.

As the nominal leader of the Anglican Communion, Williams spoke out against the election of the openly-gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, and he was equally opposed to the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster’s decision to start blessing same-sex unions. But Williams was powerless to intervene, and he was equally unable to prevent conservative Anglican churches in Africa from trying to offer ‘alternative episcopal oversight’ to disaffected American parishes.

In a bid to keep the increasingly-fractious Anglican Communion together, Williams asked each autonomous province of the Communion to sign up to an ‘Anglican Covenant’ that would oblige them to consider the views of other provinces before doing anything that “may provoke controversy.”

Furthermore, churches that breached the rules could face disciplinary action, such as suspension from inter-Anglican bodies. But it now looks as if the Church of England itself may reject the Covenant. In order to proceed to a vote in the General Synod (the church’s lawmaking body), the Covenant would need to be approved by a majority of the 44 dioceses. So far, 17 have voted against it, and only 10 have voted in favor.

When announcing his resignation, Williams attempted to downplay the effect of the row over homosexuality. “It has certainly been a major nuisance,” he said. “But in every job that you are in there are controversies and conflicts and this one isn’t going to go away in a hurry. I can’t say that it is a great sense of ‘free at last.’”

Williams may yet see one last triumph before he leaves office. In July, the General Synod could approve legislation to allow the consecration of women bishops. But many Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals oppose the plan, and they could still make life difficult for Williams as he prepares to leave office.

Williams’ successor will be found through a complex process involving both church and state. A church body known as the Crown Nominations Commission will come up with a list of two names to send to the Prime Minister. By convention, the Prime Minister then forwards the first name on to the Queen, who formally approves the appointment.

Image Courtesy of    http://www.flickr.com/photos/scottgunn/

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