ABSTRACT
More than two decades ago, on a visit to Australia, the late Monica Furlong, matriarch of the movement for the ordination of women in the Church of England, said that arguments offered against women in ministry were not really important in themselves. Opposition to women as priests and bishops has become what some have termed the 'great cause' to Sydney Anglicans, so much that they have been accused of reinterpreting a central Christian doctrine, that of the trinity, to support their stance. The Roman Catholic Church, together with traditionalists in the Anglo-Catholic stream of the Anglican Church worldwide, opposes women in holy orders mainly on the grounds of claims that Jesus did not include women among his 12 apostles, he did not ordain any women, and that only men can represent (the male) Jesus in presiding at the central Christian rite of the Eucharist.
