Church Mouse reports that Blackburn Cathedral is offering its communicants a choice of bread – a wafer consecrated by a woman priest, or a wafer consecrated by male clergy. I understand the dilemma the Chapter will have found themselves in. I have experienced plenty of times the deliberate snub of those who want to make a scene about women priests. I have celebrated communion in large and old fashioned settings where people would come to the communion rail only to stand up and walk away when I offered the bread, apparently just to make a point.

Given that people bring those kinds of quarrel that with them to Church, I can see that attempting to provide a peacemaking solution may seem a good idea. I am bothered by this elaborate accommodation, though. For one thing, what does it say about the woman priest? – we want to accept you but we aren't quite prepared to stand up and tell everyone else we do? And what will the big wide world make of it? Cathedrals are such iconic places, the public face of the Church, and to those unacquainted with the minutiae of this argument, instead of seeing a unified act of worship, I suspect they will not perceive it as kind people bending over backwards for inclusion, but a tetchy group of people that they don't want to join.