Peter Carnley
|
The Most Reverend Peter Carnley |
|
|---|---|
| Archbishop of Perth Primate of Australia |
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| Church | Anglican Church of Australia |
| See | Perth |
| In office | 1981-2005 (Primate 2000-2005) |
| Orders | |
| Consecration | 1981 |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
17 October 1937 New Lambton, New South Wales. |
Peter Frederick Carnley AC (born 17 October 1937) is a retired Australian Anglican bishop and author. He was the Archbishop of Perth from 1981 to 2005 and Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia from 2000 until July 2005. He ordained the first women priests in Australia. In the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours list, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia. He is married to Ann Carnley.
Carnley was born in New Lambton, New South Wales. He studied in Australia at Trinity College, Melbourne and in England at Emmanuel College and St John's College, Cambridge, and became warden of St John's College at the University of Queensland, as well as lecturer in theology at the University of Queensland, before becoming a bishop. As a lecturer in the 1970s he experimented with Process Theology. He holds many honorary doctorates and a Lambeth DD (2012) and is an honorary fellow of Trinity College (Melbourne), Emmanuel College (Cambridge) and St John's College (Cambridge).
In the 1980s Carnley supported the ordination of women and, on 7 March 1992, he ordained the first women priests in the Anglican Church of Australia at St George's Cathedral, Perth. His sermon on the occasion took as its reference an autobiographical piece by Charlotte Perkins Gilman entitled The Yellow Wallpaper. Carnley used Gilman's account of the self-destruction consequent on a "benignly prescribed, submissive, middle-class role" demanded of women in the 19th century to consider the "implications of the philosophy that women should "stay in their place, maintaining silence, concealing problems and repressing creativity". The yellow wallpaper of the title is what the imprisoned protagonist in Gilman's story peels off the walls as she goes mad. Carnley used it as a metaphor for the situation of the women who had been waiting to be allowed to become priests, saying: "Today, we are peeling away the sickly yellow, faded, silverfish-ridden wallpaper with which the church has surrounded itself and imprisoned women for centuries past in its benign and perhaps well-meaning determination to confine them by role."
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