"when anything goes, the first thing to go is apostolic tradition."

In an interesting piece titled When compromise trumps apostolic tradition, George Weigel notes:

… in the Church of England’s debate over the ordination of women as bishops[, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York] … proposed a compromise in which the Church of England would ordain women to its episcopate, but parishes unable to accept this innovation would be allowed to invite a male bishop to preside over those rituals for which a bishop’s presence is required. This compromise was rejected by the General Synod of the Church of England….

While the synod doubtless thought that it was whipping a few troglodyte parishes into line, its action looks to me more like a declaration of the synod's irrelevance in resolving the issue. The concerns that prompted Williams and Sentamu—he of the comical chasuble and mitre—to offer a compromise, one which surely ran against their own views, arise from literally millennia of apostolic tradition. Since most people who don't care about apostolic tradition left the Church of England (if not Christianity as a whole) a long time ago, the concerns of those left for it are unlikely to evaporate just because a thoroughly modernist general synod looks down its nose at them. (Cf. the remarks of Canon Celia Thompson1 reported here.) Those "parishes unable to accept this innovation" can, and may, resolve the issue by seizing the other "compromise" available to them: Anglicanorum Coetibus.

I'm told that the Tiber is comfortably warm in this season!

This via Fr. Finigan, who also links to a splendid documentary on Vatican City and the Pope's "normal" day. Who knew that there is an all-Vatican football tournament?!

1. 1. A canon is, roughly-speaking, the CoE equivalent of a Monsignor.