June Osborne is a woman of exceptional range, energy and intellectual vigour who will have a distinguished 20-year career in the Church behind her when she is ordained next month. She is also the woman most often tipped to become the first female Anglican bishop. She has chaired the General Synod, nursed a parish in London's East End, inspected theological colleges, locked horns with the Archbishop of York on the terms and conditions of female ordinands and agitated for greater professionalism. She has children and is married to a barrister.
Over the telephone on Saturday night she gave me an illuminating disquisition on St Paul's teachings, both in Greek and via subsequent translations, on the role of women in the Church. It elegantly embodied the synthesis she spoke of, and I couldn't help wishing that she rather than the Bishop of Bristol, had given the sermon at that historic ordination ceremony.
At first sight, the retreat of woolly liberalism in the Church of England would seem the least likely outcome of the ordination of women. Surely it is those at both ends of the Church's broad spectrum who are in retreat, the Anglo-Catholics and the conservative evangelicals? Opposition to women priests is not all that unites those much-publicised individuals who are decamping, either to Rome or to form home churches: they appear to share a feeling that they are leaving their beloved Church to the mercies of liberals whose most strongly held belief is in the power of fashion.
On the contrary, says Mrs Osborne. She believes it is the liberals who will feel least at home in the reshaped Anglican Church. What she and others like her are working for, with genuine optimism at last, is a synthesis of the Protestant and Catholic traditions that have, as she puts it, squabbled like siblings virtually ever since the Elizabethan Settlement.
"What people sometimes caricature as the Church of England's muddle-headed comprehensiveness is in fact very much more creative than that; it is an essential matter of holding the tensions between those two traditions. Intellectually, the division between those two is far smaller than the division between them and liberalism. It is much more difficult to envisage a place for the liberal view that always responds to everything in a fashionable way."
Edward Norman, formerly Dean of Peterhouse, says the Church of England is no longer a learned ministry. He welcomes the women but believes they can do little to reverse the Church's intellectual decline. Churchwomen such as June Osborne, Susan Cole-King, Dr Christina Baxter, the lay dean of St John's theological college in Nottingham, even Roman Catholics like Dr Elizabeth Stuart, an avowed feminist theologian who teaches at the Anglican college of St Mark and St John in Plymouth, would disagree. (The only significant group of demonstrators outside Bristol Cathedral on Saturday was Dr Stuart's band of Roman Catholics campaigning for women's ordination in their own church.) So would the former headmistresses, medical women and lecturers in theology who gathered in Bristol either as ordinands, ordinands-in-waiting or simply supporters.
The 32 women ordained on Saturday ranged in age from 29 to 69, and in character from those who were prepared to wait quietly for a quarter century and work for no stipend to those who have palpably been holding themselves in check, not asserting their authority until the Church sanctioned it. Even though most of them will continue doing broadly the work they have done for years, the Archbishop of Canterbury is right to foresee a great burst of energy being unleashed.
He and his colleagues have, however, somewhat overemphasised the pastoral, social-working role they envisage for the women. They are in for a surprise if they think the new priests will exercise only these traditional feminine skills. Women such as Marjorie Stanton-Hyde, a no-nonsense figure of authority in her previous life as a rural headmistress in Worcestershire, will be just as forthright as rural priests now that the undignified constraints on their celebrating the Eucharist have gone. (Rather than bring in a male colleague to "do the hocus-pocus", she used to operate a sort of takeaway system, having the bread and wine blessed in a nearby church and then bringing it back to her own.)
Miss Beale and Miss Buss would have recognised elements of the atmosphere in Bristol. There was a trailblazing air about the proceedings, with proud mothers like Mrs Hayward of Oundle trumpeting the qualities of her daughter Jane, curate at St Mary Redcliffe, the church that Queen Elizabeth I thought the fairest in the land. There were men like Father Jack House, an Anglo-Catholic who admits to having had many nights of doubt before accepting the ordination of women as God's will and finally regarding the ceremony as a triumphant new beginning.
There were evangelical men who had been won round, and country parsons whose weakly held theological objections had evaporated once they realised that what they minded was not the arrival of women, but the departure of an image of priesthood from the 1950s.
Outside the cathedral there were passers-by who, seeing my reporter's notebook, crossed the road to tell me they had been against women priests until one such had come their way and helped them through some family crisis. Several mentioned Charmian Mann, the inspiring chaplain at St Michael's hospital for sick children. There were also those, probably the majority, who wondered why it had taken so long. The noteworthy thing was that even agnostics minded enough to say so.
