English Cleric Compares Supporters of Women Bishops to Nazis
It’s about time the Catholic Church shared the limelight when it comes to controversial behavior by Christian leaders. This incident, which manages to include anti-feminism sentiment and hyperbolic analogies to Nazi Germany, revolves around the oh-so fractious debate over the role of women in the Church of England.
According to Britain’s The Daily Telegraph, the Right Rev. Wallace Benn, the Bishop of Lewes, told the Reform conference of conservative Anglicans last week: “I feel very much increasingly that we’re in January of 1939. We need to be aware that there is real serious warfare just round the corner.”
January 1939, of course, marks the month Hitler, speaking before the Reichstag, outlined his intent to annihilate Jews. Benn later stepped back from his comments, which suggest under no circumstance should women be made clergy in the Church of England.
“I was thinking in terms of storm clouds being on the horizon,” he said.
Naturally, his remarks drew heat from women’s and Jewish groups. The analogy “belittles both the scale of the suffering the Nazis cause and the scale of the moral challenge they represented,” said James Smith, chairman of The Holocaust Centre.
Sally Barnes, a representative from Women and the Church, expressed regret that a Christian would even employ Holocaust rhetoric.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO