I was talking to a man a couple of days back, a priest I’ve known since we were both contemplating ordination. He told me a story about how some years ago he’d overheard some senior priests at a big Cathedral bash, talking about the “new” women priests. They were trying to decide whether it was better actively to put enough pressure on until they couldn’t bear it and left, or whether it would be more effective to cut them dead, look through them as if they didn’t actually exist. “Has that ever happened to you?” asked my friend.

Sad to say, my experience over the last sixteen years includes arriving at theological college to find a piece of paper under my door with extremely unpleasant and unprintable comments about how women were not welcome “here”; being treated as invisible by some male priests at nearly every large Church festival I’ve attended since being ordained; and offering consecrated wafers to people at Communion rail only to have them stand up and walk away instead of receiving communion from me. I survived one co-ordinated campaign to remove me from office, and another incident when a male priest spread malicious lies about me in an attempt to discredit me. Nasty, and undeserved, but true.

So it rang plenty of bells in my head when I read this quote this morning, written by another priest:

“We are actually hated within our own family, who have no real desire to help us, but will seek to hurt us if we stay and hurt us if we go. Pray God that this fear is entirely unfounded.”

These words, though, were not written by a woman priest, but by Fr Ed, an Anglo Catholic priest writing in response to the news that another male priest who is contemplating taking up a Catholic Ordinariate hs had the very unpleasant experience of a threatening phone call and some graffiti posted on his church notice board.

I think Fr Ed’s comments put the spotlight neatly on the most important issue: that regardless of which wing of the Church you live in, or which strand of Christian belief you subscribe to, this is reprehensible behaviour, every bit as bad as the bullying that women priests have had to encounter. The point isn’t really whether this or that opinion is right or wrong. There are some Anglo Catholics who cannot accept women bishops under any circumstances; there are many more Anglicans (including catholic Anglicans) who feel that refusing women bishops undermines their integrity. It’s easy enough for everyone to think that their understanding of orthodoxy is more orthodox than someone else’s. But it’s a foundation of Christian theology that Christians should love their friends and their enemies.  Treating people as if they are invisible, spreading lies, threatening phone calls – these are not the actions of love, and whatever the provocation, they are unacceptable.