<P> In 2006 the Church of England at its General Synod made a public apology for the institutional role it played as a historic owner of slave plantations in Barbados and Barbuda . The Reverend Simon Bessant recounted the history of the church on the island of Barbados, West Indies, where through a charitable bequest received in 1710 by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, thousands of sugar plantation slaves had been appallingly treated and branded using red - hot irons as the property of the "society". </P> <P> In 2010, for the first time in the history of the Church of England, more women than men were ordained as priests (290 women and 273 men). </P>

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