CANTERBURY, ENGLAND–The Anglican church's most senior female bishop says she believes that one day the church could be led by a female Archbishop of Canterbury.
"The signposts are pointing in one direction," said Victoria Matthews, a former bishop of Edmonton who became bishop-in-residence at Toronto's Wycliffe College before moving on to become the bishop of Christchurch, New Zealand.
"I would be very surprised if it wasn't accepted worldwide," she said yesterday at the Lambeth Conference, the once-in-a-decade gathering of Anglican bishops from around the globe.
"But it would be difficult to say the timeline. A third of Anglican provinces have now given permission for women bishops," Matthews said.
The issue of female bishops has sparked controversy in the Church of England, the Anglican mother church, with threats of mass walkouts by traditionalists fiercely opposed to raising women clerics to such positions of power.
This month, the Church of England's governing body confirmed it will ordain female bishops but also opted for a code of practice that would seek to accommodate objectors.
Anglicans in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand already have had female bishops.
One in six English parish priests is a woman and, more than a decade after they were first ordained, liberals say it is insulting not to let them ascend further.
Traditionalists say that, as Jesus Christ's apostles were all men, there is no precedent for female bishops.
If a compromise allowing the ordinations can gain full acceptance and the scheduled timetable is mapped out by 2012, "it is entirely possible" that the Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans, could be a woman.
The decision by the Church of England on the ordination of female bishops provoked a frosty response from the Vatican, which called it a break from historical Christian doctrine that will drive Anglicans and Roman Catholics further apart.
Matthews retorted: "With the greatest respect, the Vatican has to understand the Anglican Communion is not synonymous with the Church of England.
The Anglican Communion has had women in the episcopate for about 20 years.
"They really need to do their homework and realize that the communion is 38 provinces and not one with satellites. That is a pretty significant error."
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is fighting fellow clerics on another divisive front.
The Lambeth Conference was hit by mass defections by conservatives, mainly from Africa, Asia and South America, who were vehemently opposed to the ordination of openly gay Bishop Gene Robinson in the United States, as well as the blessing of same-sex marriages in Canada.
Williams readily admitted at the conference on Monday that the thorny issue of women bishops was "a huge bit of unfinished business" for the Church of England.
But he did not feel that the mother church had entered the conference mortally wounded "as a bleeding, hunted animal with arrows in its side."
