Campaign for women bishops 'just like 1939': Fury as Church row is compared to Nazi crisis



The Right Rev Wallace Benn, Bishop of Lewes, said church traditionalists were in a similar situation to those who faced the Nazis in January 1939

A Church of England bishop caused outrage last night by linking those who support the ordination of women bishops to the Nazis.

The Right Rev Wallace Benn, Bishop of Lewes, said church traditionalists were in a similar situation to those who faced the Nazis in January 1939.

The conservative bishop told a conference: ‘I’m about to use an analogy and I use it quite deliberately and carefully. And it slightly frightens me to use it but I do think it’s where we’re at.

‘I feel very much increasingly that we’re in January of 1939. We need to be aware that there is real serious warfare just round the corner. It’s actually arrived in some places already. And we’re in a challenging and serious situation.’



His reference to January 1939 is all the more provocative because it was the month in which Hitler gave a speech calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe.

Last night the bishop was condemned by charities and those who support the ordination of women bishops.

James Smith, chairman of the Holocaust Centre and chief executive of the Aegis Trust, which campaigns against genocide and crimes against humanity, said: ‘Comparing the prospect of women bishops to the prospect of war with the Nazis belittles both the scale of the suffering the Nazis caused and the scale of the moral challenge they represented.

‘The Christian Church – with the exception of a few brave clerics – abjectly failed to respond appropriately to the Holocaust at the time, and has yet to fully address the implications of that failure.’

Bishop Benn was addressing the Reform conference of conservative Anglicans – the majority of whom oppose the ordination of women bishops.

He said: ‘I’ve only two years left before retirement but the Church of England into which I was ordained is not the same Church today.

‘Some decisions it may well make over the next five years are going to marginalise some of us and push us either to the very edge or out of the Church, and that’s a very serious issue.’

Sir Winston Churchill: Bishop Benn said he was 'thinking in Churchillian terms and not of Hitler' when he made his reference to 1939

He urged the several hundred Reform members at the conference to ‘wake up’ their parishes to the realisation that their conservative style of ministry could be resigned to history if women were ordained as bishops.

Bishop Benn also warned that traditionalist clergy coming up for ordination might not be ‘able’ to swear oaths of obedience to women bishops if the legislation to consecrate them was passed.

The divisive question of women bishops is already threatening to split the Church, even though the synod, the Church of England’s parliament, is not due to debate the issue until next year.

Hundreds of traditionalists have threatened to defect to Catholicism if the ordinations go ahead and the Roman Catholic Church has pledged to let them join and retain some of their practices. Some liberals have signalled that they may be willing to back down on the issue rather than risk splitting the Church.

The bishop's comments follow those of the Rt Rev John Broadhurst, Bishop of Fulham, who announced last month that he is defecting from the Church of England over the issue of women bishops, joining a new structure in the Roman Catholic Church.

At the time, he said the General Synod had been 'fascist' in its treatment of conservative Anglo-Catholics.

Bishop Benn told The Times that his comments had not been intended to offend but were more generally intended as ‘Churchillian’. He said: ‘I was thinking in... terms of the storm clouds being on the horizon.

‘People in January 1939 knew there was war coming, they knew there were some big issues, that unless something amazing happened there would be catastrophe.

‘I was thinking in Churchillian terms and not of Hitler at all, except in the sense that Hitler was the problem.’

Christina Rees, of Women and the Church, which lobbies in support of the ordination of women bishops, said: ‘The more I read what Wallace Benn said the more I am outraged by his analogy and comments.

‘That Bishop Wallace Benn can describe his position as “Churchillian” with the clear implication that, as Hitler was the problem then, so women bishops are the problem now, is mind-boggling.’

Sally Barnes, also of Watch, said: ‘I am really sorry that a man who is a Christian is talking in these terms because they do not seem very much in keeping with the Christian way of talking to each other.’