by the Revd Sorrel Shamel-Wood, 2nd year curate who is about to go on maternity leave…
On Christmas morning, my husband presided at the Eucharist and I deaconed beside him. It was at one of the churches where I serve as curate: a beautiful, thriving church in rural Oxfordshire and it was a privilege to be there. It was also a painful and nonsensical experience because my husband was helping out at the church because I am not allowed to be ordained priest. I am not allowed to be ordained priest because my husband has been married before.
Canon C4.3 of the Canons of the Church of England states:
Subject to paragraph 5 of this Canon no person shall be admitted into holy orders who has remarried and, the other party to that marriage being alive, has a former spouse still living; or who is married to a person who has been previously married and whose former spouse is still living.[1]
According to this canon, I should never be able to be ordained, because my husband’s former spouse is still living. It doesn’t affect his ministry, even though it’s his divorce, because he was admitted into holy orders long before we met. However, there is a caveat to this canon, the aforementioned paragraph 5, which states that a Diocesan bishop “may grant a faculty for the removal of this impediment… in accordance with directions given from time to time by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York acting jointly”.[2] Thus, despite the fact that I have married a divorcee, I could still be ordained priest if a faculty is granted.
The current Archbishops’ guidance is that “they will not normally consider an application for a faculty where the current marriage is less than three years old” since “the current marriage should be stable and well established”.[3] My husband and I married on July 31st 2020, as soon as the pandemic restrictions allowed us to do so. I was ordained deacon on the 14th July 2020. According to the current guidance, we cannot be granted a faculty until July 2023.
It is my contention that this guidance needs to change and to consider individual cases rather than impose an artificial and legalistic time limit. The current guidance is pastorally insensitive and has very little theological basis.
The easiest thing in my case would have been to delay our marriage until after I was priested, and indeed I was placed under considerable pressure to do so. However, I refused to delay our marriage for several reasons. Firstly, my husband is American and he couldn’t have worked in the UK without a spousal visa. He serves as an Oxford college chaplain, a job he loves and to which he feels deeply called. To put my calling in front of his, and to insist he did not work for two years until I was priested, was something I was not prepared to put him through. It would have been profoundly selfish and un-Christlike. Secondly, despite being a progressive Christian I am committed to the Church’s teaching that the best place for sex is within marriage. For me, following the Church’s teaching on this issue was more important even than following my vocation, which is one of the greatest and deepest joys of my life. I felt that as adults in our thirties, delaying our marriage by two years would be a course of action that lacked integrity and actually, the Diocese was effectively pressuring us towards the path of temptation and sin. Furthermore, I’m thirty-four years old: I knew that there was not a great deal of time on our side to establish our marriage and start a family. I’m beyond delighted that we are now expecting a baby in the next few weeks. Do the Archbishops genuinely think that our marriage lacks stability? I suggest that a half an hour conversation with my husband and me would be all that was needed to demonstrate quite the opposite: we are the love of each other’s lives, a source of mutual support without which we would struggle to thrive amidst the intense pressures of ordained ministry.
Choosing my marriage over my ordination to the priesthood has caused immense psychological stress and a great deal of pain. Watching the rest of my cohort being priested while I was left behind was especially difficult. However, I am also keenly aware that my situation is one of considerable privilege. If I were gay, then I would not be able to marry and be priested in the Church of England ever, at all. The frustration and turmoil that has beset the first years of my ministry would last a lifetime. The pressure to be secretive, to lie to my bishop, to be trapped in a compromised position, would be greater and in my opinion, unavoidable. And of course, if I had been born half a century earlier, as a woman I would never have been able to fulfil my vocation to ordained ministry at all.
The guidance surrounding Canon C4.3 is a small issue in the greater scheme of things, despite the pain it has caused me and my husband personally. But I hope that, as the Church of England engages in wider conversations about relationships, gender and marriage there will be space for it to be reconsidered. Because, frankly, the Church of England’s current preferencing of bureaucracy and legalism over integrity and pastoral sensitivity is tearing good people apart.
[1] The Canons of the Church of England https://www.churchofengland.org/about/leadership-and-governance/legal-services/canons-church-england/section-c
[2] Ibid.
[3] Sending Candidates to BAP: A Guide to the Selection process https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-10/Sending%20Candidates%20to%20BAP.pdf p.11
Any thoughts?