The Chronology For Main Line Protestant Ordination of Women Priests

puts into perspective what Douglas Bess called the miscalculation by "continuing Anglicans" that great numbers of Episcopalians would defect and join their dissident denominations when The Episcopal Church began ordaining women in the 1970s. Other Protestant denominations had been ordaining women since the 1930s, and it's worth pointing out that these other Protestants were friends, neighbors, co-workers, schoolmates, clients, colleagues, and fellow alumni of Episcopalians.

On top of that, I lived through the national debate on whether women should be admitted to a wide range of jobs in the early 1970s; the subject of women police officers was particularly contentious in Los Angeles. The upshot, of course, was that women police officers worked out just fine. IBM, an archetype of the corporate mentality, sponsored a scientific study on whether women could program computers as effectively as men, and the conclusion was that they could.

So as a personal matter, I've got no problem with women in nearly any profession, and I had no problem with The Episcopal Church's decision to ordain women, which was still fresh when I returned to it in 1980. Beyond that, the country as a whole had no problem with it, and this was at the root of the "continuing Anglican" miscalculation. Pastor Susan showed up at St Edward's, everyone greeted her at coffee hour, and life went on.

"But Mr Bruce," people may say, "you're neglecting the question of sacramental validity," and insofar as I speak as a recovering Protestant, indeed I am. Protestants don't see the sacraments the same way Catholics do. I feel fairly confident that if we were to receive an audience with the recently installed Pontiff and posed the following questions to him, we would almost certainly have something like the following dialogue:

Your Holiness, are Episcopalians Catholic?

No.

So they're Protestant?

Yes.

But there are former Episcopalians who've left that denomination and have formed their own little denominations that don't ordain women, and they say that makes them Catholic. Are they actually Catholic?

No, although my predecessor set up an Apostolic Constitution whereby they could become Catholic. . .

But if they haven't availed themselves of the Apostolic Constitution you mentioned, are they somehow still Catholic?

No.

And there you have it, from the horse's mouth, as it were. Anglicans of the unreconstructed sort outside of the Ordinariates are not Catholics, whatever they may claim themselves to be. Small-c catholic is not capital-C Catholic, as Catholics and Protestants will both tell you. This is the snake oil that "continuing Anglicans" have been peddling with little success since 1977, and nobody's buying, not even, significantly, the ACNA.

A refusal to ordain women doesn't make you Catholic. Use of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, which contains the specifically Protestant Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, makes you definitively not Catholic. Oddly, the 1979 BCP, which distances itself from the Articles by placing them in a "Historical Documents" category, is regarded as heretical, although in this matter it ought to make Anglo-Catholics more, rather than less, comfortable.

Protestants simply don't see the Sacraments the way Catholics do; that's reflected in the Articles. Consequently, Protestants have no problem, and basically ought to have no problem, ordaining women. If you want to question the validity of Sacraments conducted by women, you should probably find an option not involving being a Protestant.

The vast majority of main line Protestants seem to have recognized this at some level, including Episcopalians in the 1970s. This is at the root of the "continuing Anglican" miscalculation, which it seems to me derives from either sincere confusion, not so sincere self-deception, or outright mendacity. Of the "continuing Anglican" leadership, my personal assessment leans toward the latter.