Mural hits Catholic Church failure to ordain women priests

St. John's, an Scottish Episcopal Church in Edenburgh, Scotland, has a tradition of murals which are an appeal to community conscience.

On their Web site, they explain:

Murals addressing contemporary issues relating to justice and peace have appeared at St John's for many years. They are intended to provoke discussion and a response from passers-by on Princes Street. The murals are painted by Artists for Justice and Peace and planned by a small group including the Rector and Associate Rector of St John's.

For the pope's visit they offered the following mural commenting on the Roman Catholic Church's refusal to ordain women priests, as the Scottish Episcopal Church has since 1994:

The pope is likely to have seen it, since the mural is along the procession route he followed.

The pope is meet Church of England Canon Jane Hedges this evening when he goes to Westminster Abbey for prayer. Four years ago, she was the first woman appointed as a residentiary canon at Westminster Abbey. She is a leading candidate to become the Church of England's first female bishop.

Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth to have ordination of woman to the priesthood

Formed in a 1983 administrative division of the large and growing Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, and stripped of most of its conservatives in a series of actions following consecration of an openly gay New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson, the once profoundly conservative Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth is now effectively progressive.

As a result, 33 years after the Episcopal Church approved ordination of women, it is ready to ordain Deacon Susan Slaughter to the priesthood.

She is to be the first woman ordained to the priesthood in the history of the Fort Worth diocese, and probably a rare case in which outmigration of conservatives leaves behind a substantially more progressive diocese which takes such action.

The denomination-wide changes apparently aren't large enough thus far to cause anything other than sporadic reorientation. Specifically, total U.S. membership of active baptized members in 2007 was 2,154,572, according to the 2008 National Council of Churches Report. That indicates a 4.15% decline from the NCC's figure for 2006. ()

Along the same lines, Wikipedia reports:

In recent years many mainline denominations have experienced a decline in membership.[74] Once changes in how membership is counted are taken into consideration, the Episcopal Church's membership numbers were broadly flat throughout the 1990s, with a slight growth in the first years of the 21st century.[73][75][76][77][78] A loss of 115,000 members was reported for the years 2003–5, which has been attributed in part to controversy concerning ordination of homosexuals to the priesthood and the election of Gene Robinson (who is openly gay) as Bishop of New Hampshire.[79]

Or, looking at the 2009 edition of the Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches, we find that decline in Episcopal Church membership (1.76%) was comparable to Presbyterian Church:USA (2.79%), United Church of Christ (6.01%) and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (1.35%).

This implies that the changes which have occasioned uproar apparently took place because there was substantial support for them in the church at large.