Many speakers at the General Synod of the Church of England in York spoke yesterday of divorce as a common phenomenon among churchgoers. Even the clergy, evidently, have not been exempt. Nevertheless the synod declined by 206 votes to 213 to change the church’s rules on remarriage in church of divorced people.
One of the most telling points in favour of change came from the Bishop of Winchester, Dr John Taylor, who said the public at large could not be expected to understand the church’s position. By opposing remarriage, the synod was focussing attention on the faults and failures in a broken marriage rather than on sincere attempts to try again. “We speak of witness,” he said. “What actually is the witness of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted?”
The Bishop of Truro, the Right Rev Graham Leonard, argued that there was a valid distinction between telling someone they were right to remarry in a particular situation and advocating divorce and remarriage as a good principle in general. He had received many letters from people separated from their partners who had struggled to remain faithful to their vows; the church could not now turn around and tell them that they were mistaken to do so.
Advertisement
Mrs P. Cornwall-Jones, of Southwark, said the Bishop of Southwark, Dr Stockwood, had told his priests that he considered them free to follow their own consciences on the remarrying of divorcees in spite of general church policy against it. More than a hundred were now willing to do so. That had not, said Mrs Cornwall-Jones, caused flocks of people to cross London Bridge southwards in search of remarriage in church.