The buses are back!

Remember the fuss over atheist slogans on buses a while ago?  Well, now religious bus posters are in the news again.  The group Catholic Women's Ordination have decided to put up bus posters urging the pope to ordain women as priests, during his visit to Britain later this year. 

I don't expect Benedict will even see any, but it will raise the issue's profile.  While I don't like to see fellow Christians of whatever banner humiliated or embarrassed, I think this is a good thing.  The Roman Catholic church has made some almost schoolboy errors in dealing with this topic, notably the recent stories about classifying attempted ordination of a woman on a par with child abuse.  Unfortunately, while the Roman Catholic church's welcome attempt to show that it was taking child abuse seriously was entirely overshadowed when they  announced that ordaining women was, similarly, a serious offence against the church.

Leaving aside the question of whether ordaining women is right or wrong, I can see why they're concerned people would ignore the church's authority and that given the sensitive, controvertial nature of the issue they'd want it to be dealt with by the highest central authority.  That makes sense (more or less, if you consider women's ordination an important issue as they do).  It also makes sense to have priestly child abuse dealt with by the highest central authority.  What dosn't make sense is to appear to link them together in documents to go to the press.  That's not good PR, and surely someone should have noticed (see this for more comment). 

But the C of E's recent arguments show us that we've got nothing to be complacent about.  Personally I've been getting annoyed when 'evangelical' is almost invariably used to mean 'conservative.'  Yes, some evangelicals are.  I'm not.  Nor are quite a lot of others, at least on the issue of women bishops.  The church contains a wide variety of views.  Please don't paint us all with the same brush!