By Douglas LeBlanc
Speaking at Mere Anglicanism, a conference sponsored by a diocese that ordains women to the priesthood, priest and conservative firebrand Calvin Robinson described women’s ordination as a “tool of entryism” for critical theories about race and sex. Organizers of the conference, sponsored by the Anglican Church in North America’s Diocese of South Carolina, had asked Robinson to address the topic “Critical Theory: Antithetical to the Gospel?”
In response to Robinson’s address, organizers removed him from a panel on the conference’s final day. “I have been cancelled a few times now,” Robinson wrote on Substack. “This is the first time I have been cancelled from an event during the event.”
Robinson, formerly a deacon in the Free Church of England, was ordained a priest in 2023 through the Nordic Catholic Church, an Old Catholic body founded in 2000. On his page at X.com, he describes himself with these words: “Turbulent Priest. Unreliable Panelist. Catholic apologist. Old Catholic orders, Anglican patrimony.”
“Men are simple beings. But we do have a practical role to play in the Church, which can only be played by men. Namely, the priesthood,” Robinson said in a text of the speech that he distributed. “Liberalism would dictate that, men and women being the same, women can fulfill the same callings as men. Christianity, on the other hand, would say that women often have the great vocation of motherhood, whereas men are sometimes called to the vocation of the priesthood. A woman cannot be a priest any more than a man can be a mother. They are both tremendous blessings from God, both vital for advancing his kingdom, but neither interchangeable.”
Mere Anglicanism’s director, the Rev. Jeffrey Miller, and Bishop Chip Edgar of the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, met with Robinson after his presentation. He compared the meeting to being called into a school headmaster’s office.
Miller disputed Robinson’s account. “For the concluding panel discussion of the 2024 Mere Anglicanism Conference, Father Calvin Robinson was pulled from participating not because of his views on women’s ordination, but because he failed to address in his plenary presentation the topic that was assigned to him,” said the Rev. Jeffrey Miller, director of the conference, in a post-conference statement. “Father Robinson was not asked to leave the conference, but remained through its conclusion and was paid his full honorarium.”
In a pastoral letter issued soon after the conference, Edgar described Robinson’s remarks as “inexcusably provocative, and completely lacking in charity and pastoral consideration of the people in attendance — especially the many women clergy both of our diocese and others who attended.”
The Anglican Church in North America welcomes members on both sides of the question of ordaining women to the priesthood. The ACNA seeks to maintain what it calls “dual integrities” on women’s ordination, so that it welcomes ordained women but does not compel bishops to ordain them.
The conference welcomes members of the ACNA, the Episcopal Church, and other churches, and is based at St. Philip’s, a historic parish in downtown Charleston that entered the ACNA in 2017, with most other parishes that left the Episcopal diocese.
On a still broader point, Robinson mentioned several times that Karl Marx looked to Martin Luther as making the Catholic Church more vulnerable to Marx’s assaults. “When Marx says Luther shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith, could it be that he is saying in destroying the people’s faith in the Church, people put their faith in their own consciences?”
The dispute lingered on social media for several days after the conference, as Robinson’s defenders depicted the conference’s decision as suppressing dialogue.
Jeff Walton, who attended Mere Anglicanism to write about it for the Institute on Religion & Democracy, said that Robinson’s address met with polite applause, but also an “aggressive standing ovation and some booing.”
