ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on women's involvement in the Church of England might appear rather surprising, given the more overtly political orientation of the institutions and organizations. According to Medhurst the term marxist was even deployed in an attempt to discredit this Church initiative an initiative that some commentators have seen as something of a watershed in terms of the contemporary Churchs attempts to re-engage with the public arena in fresh and newly relevant terms. Many women aspiring to priestly ministry stressed the symbolic, as well as practical, significance of their exclusion. Schneider, a Roman Catholic theologian, refers to women's sense of sacral unworthiness and their total sacramental dependence on men. The Windsor Consultation Document also notes the way job advertisements reveal implicit masculinist assumptions about the limitations of women priests, including their alleged inability to carry out church maintenance and their greater vulnerability in relation to security issues.
