Rebels plan Synod walkout: Protests over women priests are expected at the General Synod. Andrew Brown reports

DEBATES at the Church of England's General Synod meeting this week on abortion and education will be overshadowed by the continuing efforts of the losers in the fight over women priests to recover from their defeat at the Synod's last meeting.

The Catholic Group plans to stage a walkout in protest against women priests during the education debate. But it is by no means clear that the rebellious clergy have anywhere to walk out to, or even that many of them want to go. It is probable that large departures from the Church will be averted but a prolonged and bitter sulk looks inevitable.

One leader of the resistance to women priests said last week that he expected the first hints of a Roman response to overtures from disaffected Anglicans to come through in the course of the Synod, though it will not officially be announced for some time.

The Rt Rev Graham Leonard, the former Bishop of London, hopes to lead a body of priests to Rome as a more or less self-governing entity. He has proposed that they should be organised into a 'personal prelature', which would be responsible only to the Pope, or into a 'Uniate Church', which would use Anglican liturgies while acccepting papal authority.

Both these options are dismissed by most observers on both sides of the divide. Opus Dei, the world-wide, right-wing lay movement much favoured by the present Pope, is the only existing personal prelature. A rump of several hundred former Church of England priests could not expect the same dignity.

Nor are there any large incitements to Rome to accept such an uncovenanted mercy.

And priests who leave the Church of England over the ordination of women are entitled to some financial compensation, but will lose their houses, their churches and their congregations, as the law stands.

Resistance to the principle of women priests, as opposed to their appearance in particular parishes, is a largely clerical phenomenon.

One of the Anglican visitors to the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Hume, was told by an official: 'We have no jobs, no money, and no houses for you.'

Within the Church of England, opponents of women priests are already trying to make good their threats to withdraw financial support from supporters of the reform. Others hope that parliamentary support will grow for a division of the Church's assets if there is a formal divorce.

The Additional Curates Society, a Victorian Anglo-Catholic charity, has been withdrawing its subsidies to any parishes in favour of women's ordination.

'Forward in Faith', the umbrella organisation set up for opponents of women priests, has 3,500 clergy on its books, not all active. The great majority are Anglo-Catholic, though there are a number of Conservative evangelicals who oppose women priests, but will certainly not go to Rome.

A large majority of the others want some agreement that will allow them to continue in the Church without having to accept women priests.