The Church of England is groping towards a harmonious solution of its internal crisis over the ordination of women bishops, but with no guarantee that such a solution exists. The crisis reveals much about the nature of Anglicanism itself. The Anglican claim to be both Catholic and Reformed is a challenging one, for it sets up a tension at the heart of the Church between two tendencies which sometimes point in opposite directions. One problem with the claim is that very few Anglican individuals are both Catholic and Reformed in themselves, even if the Church of England is as a whole: individuals tend to be one or the other and, indeed, so do parishes. The weakness of the third way, liberal Anglicanism, is that it regards both these positions through the lens of relativism, denying both of them any enduring claims to truth.

But all coexist inside the same Church. This principle of Anglican comprehensiveness was dictated more by the circumstances of English history than by some blinding theological insight, but it does have its parallels there, for instance in the tensions between the Pauline and the Petrine principles which are described in Acts and have continued to rumble on ever since. Indeed the early Church could have split along those lines, were it not for the fact that St Paul and St Peter realised the danger and steered away from it in time. Sometimes, as Brendan Byrne points out on page 16, the Pauline-Petrine tension is seen as being between the prophetic and the traditional. It is a comparison that flatters the former and a premise that disguises the point at the heart of the current Anglican dilemma.

If one tries to be prophetic without at the same time being traditional, what weight does it have? On whose behalf is one being prophetic? It is one thing to say that the entire thrust of Christian history leads ultimately to the conclusion that ordination to the priesthood and episcopacy should be open to either sex. It is quite another to say that the thrust of ...

Forward in Faith, which represents traditionalist Anglo-Catholics in the Church of England, has written to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York warning them that many of its members could "defect" if women bishops were introduced without adequate safeguards. The letter was signed by 1,333 clergy, and the issue comes before the General Synod later this month. ...

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A gathering of a family around the supper table is a moment when the bonds that are shared are reinforced, the love its members have for one another is enhanced and the very experience of coming together can strengthen them as they go out into the world. But it is also a place where old jealousies can resurface, where squabbling can break out and enmities occur. That, sadly, is also true of those called to the Lord's ...

The papal nuncio to Great Britain has let it be known he has begun consultations to find a successor to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor as Archbishop of Westminster. In that spirit The Tablet has been publishing a range of opinions from Catholics, lay and clerical, and today we complete the exercise with a list of the names, which - as far as it is possible to tell - the nuncio might be considering. It is necessarily ...