Thou shalt not criticise – bishops plan speech code to silence rebels
by Julian Mann, TCW:
AHEAD of the General Synod meeting this week in York, the House of Bishops has revealed that it is looking to enforce institutional unity on the deeply divided Church of England through a speech code.
The idea has emerged in the bishops’ proposal to Synod that vicars should be allowed to offer ‘stand-alone’ Prayers of Love and Faith (services of blessing for same-sex couples) on a trial basis from 2025.
Vicars have been allowed to bless homosexual couples in regular services since December 2023. But the stand-alone services where couples could have dedicated celebrations in parish churches after civil marriage have become bogged down in legal arguments. Church lawyers have told the bishops that the services could be open to legal challenges on the grounds that they represent a change in the Church’s teaching on sexual morality and so require a two-thirds majority vote in Synod.
Such a threshold would be unattainable in the current General Synod which is why the bishops are trying the experimental route to get the stand-alone services launched. The bishops are possibly calculating that the tsunami of political and media outrage which would follow if the gay wedding celebrations were withdrawn will deter synodical attempts to stop them.
The July Synod paper outlining the proposals, called without any apparent irony ‘Moving together as one Church’, reveals the bishops’ plan to impose institutional unity on the deeply divided C of E.
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