Peter Bottomley
Main Page: Peter Bottomley (Conservative - Worthing West) Equal Marriage: Church of England
Peter Bottomley Excerpts(1 year, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate
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Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
I call the Father of the House.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
The whole House should be grateful to the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) for the way he has raised this.
We recognise that our Second Church Estates Commissioner, my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), is a channel of peace rather than of conflict, but may I say to him, as I said to his predecessor over the appointment of women bishops, that this House will not put up with being held up by one third of one part of the General Synod?
Members may wish to look at the Library briefing from 11 August 2022 to see that the enabling Act of 1919, which established a General Synod as a way to stop Bills having to go through all the formal stages in the House of Commons, can be amended and that some recent legislation wrongly gave permission for flying bishops and people under them to refuse to recognise women ordained in the Church of England.
We are coming to a stage, on that and on this, where the Church of England needs to wake up. I commend to it the establishment of a commission similar to the Chadwick commission, and for it to ask itself how to get out of this dilemma. Does it want to solve it, or will it leave it to us to do that for it?
Andrew Selous
I have great respect, of course, for what the Father of the House says, and I know that many Members in this House take a close interest in what happens in the General Synod of the Church of England, but it goes equally the other way. Today I commit to the Father of the House, and to all right hon. and hon. Members here, to feed back to the General Synod fully and frankly not only the views of the House, as have been set out here, but the strength of feeling on these issues. That is my role as Second Church Estates Commissioner.