BACK in 1994, I was a bit surprised to be arrested in the cathedral where my dad and I had been ordained. I had sneaked into York Minster early one morning, and was pacing out the nave altar rail when two vergers sidled up and grabbed me firmly by the arms. “Oh, it’s you, David,” Alex, the senior verger grinned. “We didn’t recognise you in your biking gear.”
The York Minster police and the vergers, their deputies, have powers of arrest; so I had had a narrow escape. I was checking the altar rail to see whether 39 kneeling women could fit around it for their forthcoming ordination to the priesthood. York diocese’s senior staff had made rude remarks that the women did not have the lean and hungry physique of normal ordinands, having been fattened up by decades of parish bunfights during their long wait for ordination.
I was the Archbishop of York’s chaplain back then, the stupid-boy Pike of the senior staff, quietly observing their every meeting but adding my spin when I wrote up the minutes. Having been commissioned to check the Minster’s dimensions, I calculated that the maximum capacity would be 21; so we would have to go for two ordinations on successive Saturdays in May.
THE whole process had been fraught from the start, when, in October 1992, 39 women deacons had mustered in Bishopthorpe Palace’s drawing room. Fearing that the forthcoming General Synod vote would go against them, the Archbishop, John Habgood, wanted to build bridges.
The meeting went badly, three male suffragans, three male archdeacons, one male dean, and I all racking up the testosterone, along with the Archbishop’s seven 20th-century predecessors paternalistically sneering from their proud portraits.
SUPPLIED BY DAVID WILBOURNEThe Habgoods
The Archbishop tried to break the women’s surly silence with tales of his curacy days in 1950s Kensington. His vicar had encouraged him to visit women only in the morning, when they would be too busy with household tasks to contemplate seducing the dishy curate. This vignette hardly improved their mood; nor did his promise that they could be deacons-in-charge. “David, let’s have some tea,” he piped up desperately.
I dutifully went in search of Mrs Habgood, and found her taking off her wellies, a shotgun ominously propped up by the kitchen door. She had been shooting mink, who wrought havoc with indigenous nesting birds.
“The Archbishop wondered about tea,” I stuttered.
“How many?”
“Fifty.”
“Fifty? I didn’t even know he had a meeting. What’s it about?”
“It’s the women deacons,” I began to explain before she cut me short.
“That lot? They’ve driven John up the wall with their women’s-lib agenda. I’d rather give them strychnine than tea.” She rummaged about in the cupboard under the sink with a mischievous glint in her eye, looking for rat poison while I hunted for cups.
SURPRISINGLY, the General Synod voted narrowly in favour, tipped over the line by the Revd June Osborne’s heartfelt tears. Interestingly, on the evening before the debate, John Habgood had encouraged her to speak. An elderly deaconess — Christian Howard, of Castle Howard fame — cornered wavering men in the basement, threatening them with castration if they voted against.
When the result was announced, Andrew Purkis, George Carey’s adviser, tore a scrap from my notepad, scrawled “Congratulations!” in Biro, and passed it to his boss. I didn’t follow suit; I couldn’t forget the strychnine.
In the aftermath, my Archbishop was preoccupied with a wider canvas, forging the Act of Synod, beginning in January when a host of crusty clerics piled into Bishopthorpe’s Great Hall. A few were smart and slim, but many were portly and shabby, their 39-buttoned cassocks stained with 39 shades of breakfast.
Courtesy of Sue SherrifEast Riding archdeaconry ordination at York Minster on 14 May 1994
The Archbishop sported his far-away look, tinged with regret. It was Raymond, his Machiavellian press adviser’s idea: “Your Grace,” he’d said, “we need to build bridges with those against the ordination of women to keep them on board.” Looking at the motley gathering, I doubted whether they had ever been on board.
I realise now that Habgood shared my doubts. When I interviewed him for his biography in 2006, he explained: “The Act of Synod enabled a context in which the Church could learn about women priests in practice without dividing itself. The hope and expectation was that those opposed would play their part to discover whether women’s ministry was blessed and a blessing, or not. It was a deliberately transitory measure for a five-year period of reception — that’s why we appointed PEVs [Provincial Episcopal Visitors, also known as “flying bishops”] who had no more than five years before their retirement.”
Despite my reservations, I had encouraged the Archbishop to light a fire to defrost the 13th-century hall perched above the frozen Ouse. He had rejected my other idea: to buy up all the left-over deep-filled mince pies that the local Co-op had on offer, and serve them with a generous glass of mulled wine. More fool him, I thought; five dozen mince pies would have been cheaper than flying bishops. Once every refusEnik had been ushered in, he slammed the Great Hall door in my face: “Not for you.”
WHAT was for me as Director of Ordinands was organising York diocese’s first ordination of women priests. Every possible impediment was put in my way.
Mrs Habgood was a leading member of York Minster’s congregation, and a skilled violinist in the Guildhall Orchestra, who played a Mozart Mass at every Minster occasion. I fear she nobbled the Minster’s music department, who made it clear that not only would Mozart not be played at the women’s ordinations, but that the choir would not perform, either. It seemed that the Minster’s preference was a said service with a purple stole at an unholy hour, akin to a shotgun wedding.
The choirs of Beverley Minster and Selby Abbey kindly came to my rescue, and I worked hard to make it the best of occasions, since I believed with all my heart that God’s justice demanded the ordination of women. Normally, I could depend on the support of three excellent secretaries at Bishopthorpe, but that support was inexplicably (or perhaps all too explicably) unavailable for this venture; so I did all the typing for orders of service, tickets, and correspondence myself.
We adjusted the ASB 1980 ordination service to be inclusive, making 11 alterations from male to female pronouns, etc. We retained the word “watchmen”, since there wasn’t really an alternative, on the basis that what was good enough for Bach’s Wachet Auf was good enough for us.
David WilbourneArchbishop Habgood and his senior staff team (not featuring David Wilbourne)
Our previous experience of gender-reassignment at Bishopthorpe was limited to an incident in the early 1970s, when a vicar from Leeds had dropped a line to Archbishop Coggan to inform him, en passant, that he’d had a sex-change operation. The most puritanical of 20th-century archbishops was, to say the least, on a steep learning curve, and curtly informed the vicar that he could not continue as incumbent, but offered him a post as a deaconess, with a substantial pay cut the only sanction.
George Austin, the traditionalist Archdeacon of York, objected that the women had never been selected or trained for priesthood, despite their significant hands-on experience of ministry. We placated him by arranging an interview for each of the ordinands with a member of York’s recruitment and selection committee — senior selectors who often assisted me as DDO with complex cases. I insisted that all the interviews should be conducted with a light touch, majoring in affirmation.
We extended the usual 48-hour ordination retreat to a week on this occasion, to include an element of training — or, at least, that’s what we told George Austin. I insisted that the menu was five-star; so, by the time the Archbishop visited to give his customary ordination charge on the Thursday, the ordinands were well and truly sated.
Courtesy of Sue SherrifThe women’s ordination retreat at Wydale Hall, in 1994
Normally, before their ordination, candidates spent the final evening dining at Bishopthorpe. To prevent an Edwardian house party turning into Murder on the Ouse Express, we had housed the women in a safe house, the diocesan retreat centre nestling in the North York Moors at Wydale.
The women were not pleased at their exile, and the director of training who was running the retreat tipped me off that they had deliberately placed two nursing mothers on the front row of the chapel. Their babies suckled noisily during the address, but John, who had rejoiced to see his wife, Rosalie, breastfeed their four children, was not fazed in the least. Instead, he spoke beautifully, for 40 minutes, on how to say and how not to say the dominical words: “This is my body. . . This is my blood.”
YORK MINSTER, one of the largest cathedrals in Christendom, suddenly decided that its capacity was little more than an average village school, and limited the number of tickets per ordinand to ten. This seemed harsh, considering the number of pastoral contacts that our women deacons had built up over the years; so I stretched it a bit and allowed parish coach parties in addition to the allocated ten. It meant that the women were gunning for me for limiting the places, and the Minster was simultaneously gunning for me for extending them.
I was determined that our three daughters, aged eight, six, and four at the time, should be present for these historic occasions, but I was refused tickets for them and my wife. Despite their powers of arrest, the vergers were fortunately on side, and so smuggled four tickets out for me for the second ordination.
Bishopthorpe Palace suddenly decided to stage an open day on the first of the ordination Saturdays, and archiepiscopal eyebrows were raised at my inevitable absence. That first ordination was on 14 May, the feast of St Matthias, whose elevation in place of the traitor Judas seemed rather apt.
Archdeacon Austin objected that the second ordination, on 21 May, would be in breach of canon law, since ordinations should take place at Embertide, or on a saint’s day. Fortunately, it turned out to be St Helena’s Day, a popular dedication in York because she was the mother of Constantine, who had been proclaimed emperor in the city. I composed a collect in her honour, focusing on our all seeking the true cross. . .
David WilbourneThe author with John Habgood
Who would lay on hands proved contentious. The senior staff got into a panic about the usual practice of all priests present joining the ordaining bishop in the laying on of hands as a college of priests. Fearing that the scrum could be triumphalist and difficult to control, they limited the college of priests for each candidate to four, which struck me as cruel, considering the number of clerics who would have encouraged each candidate over many years.
I fear that they were preparing the ground for future ordinations in which candidates would not wish women, or those who had ordained them, to be in the college of priests.
I was to be particularly vigilant about any American priest, since they might — horror of horrors — have been ordained by a woman bishop, or by John Spong, the ultra-radical Bishop of Newark, or be a practising homosexual. If so, I was to exclude them on those grounds. I don’t recall that there were any Americans taking part, and, had there been, I was far too shy to discuss their sex life.
But I did wonder back then, had one slipped through the net, whether it really would have invalidated the whole ordination? Did the Church no longer subscribe to Article XXVI, “Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacrament”? Faced with the present-day spectacle of bishops-elect deciding who is and who isn’t fit to consecrate them, many may still wonder when that Article was ruled to be inept, and set aside. I suppose it was ever thus.
When I was a curate in Middlesbrough, in 1981, my training incumbent banned me from attending the eucharist before clergy-chapter meetings unless he was the celebrant, because “otherwise the mass was invalid.” I disobeyed him, shunning a lift in his car, and cycled to every eucharist, enjoying and benefiting from the breadth that is the essence of the Church of England.
Maybe because of his acute domestic situation, the Archbishop declined to attend the ordinations, delegating the job to his suffragans at Hull and Selby: they normally ordained priests, anyway, in their parishes, while the Archbishop ordained deacons in the Minster. I asked the Archbishop whether I could lead in the ordaining bishop with the Archbishop’s Primatial Cross, to signify his assent to the whole proceedings; he firmly declined.
Before the first ordination, I was robing in my customary blue cape as Archbishop’s Chaplain. Richard Shephard, a famous composer, head of the York Minster Choir School and close friend of Mrs Habgood, forcibly removed it, replacing it with the cope of the Archdeacon of York, who was inevitably absent. Although I was flattered to have this sudden preferment thrust upon me, I was deeply saddened that my Archbishop had been distanced from a cause that he had so enthusiastically espoused; he went to his death never having ordained a woman priest.
I FOUND it an intensely busy and stressful time, but assumed that, once we had ordained the first women, it would be game over. Yet the tensions that had filled my time in those heady weeks back in 1994 still loomed 15 years later, when I became Assistant Bishop of Llandaff, where a significant minority of priests refused to receive communion from me because I was in favour of women’s ordination. (Or maybe it was just because I was English: the entire Bench of Welsh Bishops, apart from me, had once boycotted a eucharist at a meeting of the English House of Bishops in Oxford because the liturgy wasn’t in Welsh.)
Whenever I celebrated in their churches, they would provide hosts that they had previously consecrated for me to communicate the congregation with validly — I ignored them, and used to break my priest’s wafer into tiny pieces to communicate the throng. I fear that Llandaff’s women priests were also suspicious of me, because I had worked for the man who had visited the Act of Synod upon the Church of England.
I never told them that, when we were driving to consecrate the first PEV in York Minster, John Habgood and I had had a furious row, because I was so unhappy at being there at all.
Despite all the hassle, though, those 1994 ordinations proved the best days of my life — brilliant occasions that our three daughters still recall. The Yorkshire Post ran a front page photo of me laying hands on the first candidate with the Bishop of Selby. When Mrs Habgood spotted it, she didn’t speak to me for a fortnight. Even after she forgave me, I made sure I made my own coffee.
The Rt Revd David Wilbourne is an Honorary Assistant Bishop in York diocese, and is the author of Just John: The authorised biography of John Habgood (SPCK, 2020) (Books, 1 May 2020, Podcast, 15 May 2020) and Archbishop’s Diary: A year with John Habgood (SPCK, 1995).