The Anglican Church's most senior woman bishop said she believed that one day the church would be led by a woman Archbishop of Canterbury. "The signposts are pointing in one direction," said Victoria Matthews, for 15 years a bishop in Canada and now moving to minister in Christchurch, New Zealand.
"I would be very surprised if it wasn't accepted world-wide," she said on Tuesday 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," she said.
The issue of women bishops has sparked controversy in the Church of England, the Anglican mother church, with threats of mass walkouts by traditionalists fiercely opposed to them.
Earlier this month, the Church of England's governing body confirmed it will ordain women 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 women bishops.
One in six of English parish priests is a woman and, more than a decade after they were first ordained, liberals say it is insulting not to admit them to positions of power.
Traditionalists say that, as Jesus Christ's apostles were all men, there is no precedent for women bishops.
Frosty response
If the compromise wins full acceptance and the scheduled timetable is mapped out by 2012, the Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans, could one day be a woman.
"Once they are in the episcopate, it is entirely possible," Matthews said.
The decision by the Church of England on women bishops provoked a frosty response from the Vatican which called it an historic break from Christian doctrine that will drive Anglicans and 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 realise 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 US Bishop Gene Robinson and 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."
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