Bishop of Rochester: women's ordination "provisional"

Ed: Is this, one wonders, linked to his 'retirement' decision? Virtue OnLine is carrying correspondence between William Tighe and Dr Michael Nazir Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, on the subject of women's ordination. In his reply to Tighe, the Bishop says,

Naturally, when and if a new ecclesial situation is created by Anglican and Roman Catholics receiving papal primacy as set out in [the ARCIC report] Gift, everything else will have to be re-evaluated in the light of such a development. The Church of England has said that the ordination of women must be open to reception by the Universal Church and is, in this sense, provisional. You may know that I chaired the commission which produced the so-called Rochester Report on women bishops. This report rehearsed many of the difficulties which are involved. We were also conscious of the response of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference which said, interalia, that Anglican Bishops could not, at the same time, claim to belong to a world-wide college of bishops and to change its nature unilaterally. I referred to this response in the General Synod itself.

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