Church of England – Page 4 – All Things Considered

22 Dec

Be nice to a Welby near you

Each Archbishop of Canterbury finds his own way to cause annoyance. For example, in his final sermon, Rowan Williams told us: “The Church has a lot of catching up to do with secular mores.”

Thus he neatly inverted the biblical commandment, “Be ye not conformed to this world.”

Williams grew into the habit of making irritating utterances gradually over the years of his incumbency at Canterbury, but Justin Welby arrived on the scene fully accomplished in the art of getting up our noses.

In his special irritating remark for Christmas, Welby says, we should “take the risk” of being kind to “those wrongly seen as different.” And, in case we don’t immediately get the gist of what he means here, he adds a helpful hint, saying that this past year has been “an extremely tough one” particularly, “for our Muslim brothers and sisters.”

So really we ought to go out of our way to be nice to Muslims for whom things are so tough.

I don’t suppose you need any reminding, but I will remind you anyhow: the Archbishop of Canterbury is the chief priest of the Church of England and the worldwide Anglican Communion.

So it would be reasonable for you to conclude that he is a Christian.

Now, in Syria and Iraq this past year has been “an extremely tough one” for Christians. For you see their “Muslim brothers and sisters” have been burning down their churches, torturing, raping and beheading them. In fact Christians are suffering persecution explicitly in the name of Islam in countries from Nigeria in the west to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the east.

Also, in the name of Islam,many innocent people have been shot dead or blown to bits in Paris, the USA, Nigeria. Mali, Lebanon and a dozen more places.

All these people were despatched by our “Muslim brothers and sisters.”

You might think that the Archbishop has very slightly got the emphasis wrong. You may be tempted to become impatient with him.

But look, it’s Christmas and we should all exercise that most excellent gift of charity.

So, if you happen to bump into Justin Welby, swallow your annoyance and “take the risk” of being nice to him.

He’s probably had “an extremely tough year.”

22 Nov

Oh gosh, yes!

I confess that I sometimes doubt the existence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. You may think this perverse of me for, after all, there is a great accumulation of evidence for his existence.

He looks every inch an Archbishop. I mean, by the size of his cross and the spread of his grin, you can tell he is no rank and file clergyman. And the content of his speeches is so far up the Richter scale of inanity that any lingering doubts about his archi-episcopal credentials must be immediately dispelled.

I admit it is feeble of me to continue to doubt, but I cannot stop sceptical thoughts from entering my head. For example, if there really is a genuine Archbishop of Canterbury, why is the Church of England in such a mess?

And, when I see this Archbishop-like apparition opening and closing his mouth, why do i hear no concurrent theological sense? I am long past hoping that the Archbishop might be a competent theologian, but at least we might expect him to be of Sunday School standard? Alas, he is not even that. For example, he says today that the Paris massacres made him doubt God. But the youngest girl in Sunday School would have been able to tell him that the atrocities were not God’s fault and that the terrorists were entirely to blame for them.

The question of where God was in all that suffering would be readily answered by your average Confirmation candidate: “God was suffering with the victims.”

Given the massive religious incompetence of the Welby-like personage, when asked if I ever doubt the existence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, I have to say,

“Oh gosh, yes!”

06 Aug

God, what a prayer!

Can you imagine, even for half a minute, anyone actually sitting down and composing this:

God, you are the Father of all the families of the earth,
and call the nations to live in peace and unity.
We remember with sorrow the devastating destruction and death
unleashed on this day upon the city of Hiroshima,
and later upon the city of Nagasaki.
We pray for the people of Japan,
and all whose lives are disfigured by war.
We pray for ourselves,
the often unwise stewards of the powers of the universe.
Transfigure the lives and cities scarred by conflict
by the revealing of your glory
and move us by your uncreated energies
to advance your sovereign purpose of peace.
This we ask in the name of Jesus Christ,
our light and our salvation.

It is the Church of England’s official prayer for Hiroshima. What a nerve they must have to talk to God like that! The first line is at best offensive and at worst blasphemous. Notice, the utter lack of reverence, the failure to indicate the great inequality that separates our existence from God’s existence. The eternal maker of all that there is, the sun, the moon and the stars is addressed in a perfunctory manner. What upstart could think to begin speaking to the Almighty with, “God, you…”? You wouldn’t talk to a dog like that.

The model for formal prayers is the Collects in The Book of Common Prayer, and no one trying to frame words of thanksgiving or petition can afford to ignore the Collects, masterpieces in miniature all of them. The first thing to notice about the Collects is that they establish a proper courtesy by regarding God as infinitely greater than ourselves; “Almighty and ever-living God…” for instance. “O Lord and everlasting Father…” Or “Blessed Lord…”

Next the Collects do not presume to tell God his business; “God, you.” God’s activities are referred to by means of subordinate clauses: “Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning.” To say the least, this is astonishingly beautiful. It is also polite. How would the illiterate, self-elevating thug who produced the prayer for Hiroshima have begun that Collect of thanksgiving for the Scriptures?

We know, because he has himself provided the model: “God, you wrote the Bible.” And then the prayer is a confusion of notions and sentiments with heavy words all rushing together: “families…nations…peace…unity…sorrow” and so on, so that the worshipper is not helped to focus attention on a theme.

And what is the sentiment of the prayer? This – insofar as it exists – is evasive and imprecise. I can imagine someone sincerely writing that we remember Hiroshima with penitence – because he believes we were wrong to drop the bomb. I can imagine someone else praying, “We remember with thanksgiving” – because the dropping of the bomb shortened the war and saved many lives. But sorrow only reveals the prayer as muddled, inarticulate and indecisive.

And – because the bomb was dropped on the Feast of the Transfiguration – there is this cack-handed attempt to weave together banal contrasts: disfigure, transfigure, powers of the universe, uncreated energies.

Just when you think the church’s liturgists couldn’t get any worse, they discover new depths of incompetence whereby God is insulted and mocked.

02 Aug

Who gets the Lebensraum?

Before his annexation of a particular country, Adolf Hitler would announce to the world: “This is my last territorial demand.” Then he would send in his troops and take over several other states as well.

Hitler’s method has formed the pattern for the development of the Church of England over the last half century

Back in the 1960s, when sane Anglicans protested against the trashy new orders of service which were then being produced, the bishops and the synod assured us: “These are merely alternatives. The Book of Common Prayer will always remain the standard for worship and doctrine in the Church of England.”

Like Hitler, they lied. Today churches which use The Book of Common Prayer for their main services are as hard to come by as the four-leafed clover.

When it came to that other piece of iconoclasm, the abolition of the all-male priesthood, the hierarchical innovators proceeded similarly. The early synodical votes on the women priests issue went against the feminists. So, as the true democrats they always claimed to be, did they accept the votes? Of course not. In the words of John Habgood, Archbishop of York in the 1980s, “The vote has been lost, so now we must decide how to proceed.”

But, if the vote is lost, you don’t proceed, John: that’s what democracy means.

Now the feminists have achieved their stated aims and we have women priests and women bishops.

But this is not their last territorial demand.

There is a group of feminists who call themselves WATCH, which stands for Women and the Church. I don’t know why they didn’t call themselves Women in the Church – since that is what they are – and then we could have had a more interesting acronym.

All the while the bureaucratic scheming was going on to provide us with women priests and women bishops, various solemn undertakings were announced to provide also for the priestly and episcopal oversight of orthodox Anglicans who were not prepared to accept the feminists’ innovations which are clearly in breach of New Testament teaching and the doctrine of The Book of Common Prayer.

And so alternative episcopal oversight became a reality in the shape of the so-called flying bishops. (Please note that word alternative: in the mouths of the modernisers it is always a lie and a trick)

Let me give you the most recent example, the latest territorial demand, as it were.

All bishops celebrate Chrism Masses at which the holy oils are blessed. The orthodox, genuine bishops obviously celebrate these Masses for the benefit of the orthodox believers. The bishops appointed by the feminists do likewise.

Fair enough?

Not for WATCH. They have made a complaint to high officialdom concerning the very existence of these Chrism Masses among the orthodox. They say such Masses are divisive and shouldn’t be allowed.

I suppose we are meant to think that there was nothing divisive about the overthrow of 2000 years of Christian tradition in the creation of women priests and bishops!

WATCH’s objection perfectly exemplifies their desire not to live side-by-side with the orthodox, but to ban our orthodox observances: effectually, to stamp us out.

This is their latest territorial demand – but it will not be their last.

30 Jul

As rigorously transparent as a barn door

A journalist from Newsweek was interviewing Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury: “Some suspect there is still a hierarchy above the law. I was thinking of Jimmy Savile.”

The Archbishop replied: “If there is, I don’t know about it. As regards child abuse, there is rigorous transparency.”

So why, after numerous allegations of child-abuse perpetrated by senior politicians, are we no nearer to learning the truth? The homes of some of these retired or deceased politicians – such as Harvey Proctor and Leon Brittan – have been raided by the police, but their findings have not been disclosed

How transparent are the dealings of a political establishment which was content to see a knighthood bestowed on Cyril Smith, despite officials having warned Margaret Thatcher of paedophile allegations against him? Councillors in Rochdale, Smith’s constituency, have repeatedly stated that, while everybody knew what Smith was up to, he was regarded as too close to the Establishment to be named.

Then there are allegations that Dolphin Square, a 7.5-acre, 1,250-flat complex by the Thames, was a place in which boys from nearby Lambeth care homes were ferried to the apartments for violent orgies where VIPs, defence and Whitehall officials, Establishment types, as well as Tory MPs (including one cabinet minister) were participants. Scotland Yard has spoken of “possible homicide” being committed. Historical and more recent allegations have been backed by Labour MP John Mann, who first encountered them as a Lambeth councillor in the 1980s, but was told by the police that their inquiries had been stopped on orders from superiors.

Do these things appear to you as examples of Welby’s rigorous transparency?

As an Anglican priest for forty-five years, and a City of London rector for fourteen of those years, I have had more than a nodding acquaintance with the ways of the Establishment. Most of the high-ranking men and women I’ve been responsible to or have otherwise dealt with were conscientious and above reproach. But here and there, now and again, I have come across a chilling arrogance emanating from an Establishment type – the patrician prisoner of his personal sense of entitlement – who believes that a thing is true just because he says it is true.

The kind of arrogance, in fact, which in spite of the evidence, declares, “There is rigorous transparency.”

08 Jul

The meaning of TEC

I recall the intense pleasure when I was first first taught the rudiments of the differential calculus donkey’s years ago: this seemingly miraculous, and charmingly simple, means of calculating increases and decreases in rates of change. Well, I don’t think the editors of Church Times needed the calculus to measure the catastrophic increase in the pace of the decline – literally dismemberment – of the Church of England. That newspaper is really the house journal of the C. of E. and it is read by more than 90% of the clergy and a good proportion of the laity. The current edition must give them all pause for thought, for it has devoted ten pages to consider the “apocalyptic” decline of the English church which, some claim, will barely exist in twenty years’ time. Most churchgoers are elderly or old. Their numbers are not being replaced. Thus – we might say rather late in the day – appraised of the crisis, we have those ten pages of head-scratching in CT, as sociologists, clergy, theologians and religious pundits cast around for what might be done.

On the basis of the well-known fact that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it, we should ask first what has been going on in the English church in the last half century which has – shall we say – coincided with its collapse. Let me mention a few of what seem to me to be the most significant features.

The last fifty years have seen the rise of theological reductionism. Bluntly, this means that ancient doctrines, always previously proclaimed as true and the foundational beliefs of the church have been, in the jargon, demythologised. So Jesus was not born of a virgin and he didn’t rise from the dead. His miracles were really “acted parables” – that is more jargon for the claim that they didn’t actually happen.

Concurrent with theological reductionism has run a fifty years programme of liturgical “reform” which has seen the discarding of The King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. This means that there is no longer observance of the rule that all the realm shall have one use. In fact, these changes mean that you have no idea what you’re going to find in a church service until the service begins. It’s a sort of churchy babel in which no two churches do the same thing and many priests and ministers seem to do as they like.

In addition to these changes, the bishops, the clergy and the synod have endorsed the secular mores of the age.

I have commented enough on these matters and I will not do so again here, but conclude with a single observation:

In those churches where the ancient doctrines are still taught as true, where traditional scriptures are used and where the moral teaching which stood the church apart from pagan practices is still taught, there is life and growth. Churches in Africa, Central and South America and parts of the Far East are burgeoning.

By contrast, the churches which have most successfully modernised themselves are failing, and – perhaps this is where the calculus comes in – those modernising more rapidly are also failing faster.

The church which has modernised itself to the greatest extent is the Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA).

Recently this institution changed its name from ECUSA to The Episcopal Church, known widely as TEC

Some, basing their remark on observation, say that TEC stands for The Empty Church

05 Jul

Prayers before a capitulation

Here are three prayers issued by the Church of England for the minute’s silence in commemoration of those slaughtered on the beach in Tunisia.

“Father, you know our hearts and share our sorrows.We are hurt by our parting from those whom we loved: when we are angry at the loss we have sustained,when we long for words of comfort,yet find them hard to hear,turn our grief to truer living,our affliction to firmer hope in Jesus Christ our Lord.Amen.”

***
”Lord, have mercyon those who mourn who feel numb and crushed and are filled with the pain of grief,whose strength has given up. You know all our sighing and longings:be near to us and teach us to fix our hope on you through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

***
”Lord, do not abandon us in our desolation.Keep us safe in the midst of trouble,and complete your purpose for us through your steadfast love and faithfulness,in Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.”

No mention of the rightness of our cause in waging war on a terrorising barbarism, only the gospel of touchy-feeliness.

“Numb and crushed…strength given up.” There speaks the church militant! I’m only surprised that these prayers were not accompanied by a rubric saying, At this moment the officiating priest shall raise a white flag.

What a falling off there has been from better days and better ways! In AD 732 the Christian Charles Martel fought the Battle of Tours to halt the Muslim takeover of Europe. Again in 1571 an alliance of Catholic maritime states repulsed the Muslim threat at Lepanto.

So here is a prayer in time of war from The Book of Common Prayer (1662) – a book which, of course, the C. of E. has discarded:

“O Almighty God, King of all kings, and Governor of all things, whose power no creature is able to resist, to whom it belongeth justly to punish sinners, and to be merciful to them that truly repent: Save and deliver us, we humbly beseech thee, from the hands of our enemies; abate their pride, asswage their malice, and confound their devices; that we, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore from all perils, to glorify thee, who art the only giver of all victory; through the merits of thy only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

And here is the second verse of the National Anthem:

”O Lord our God arise,

Scatter her enemies,

And make them fall:

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On Thee our hopes we fix:

God save us all.”

I look forward to the day – not to be long delayed – when the pusillanimous, faithless, gutless C. of E. issues A form of prayer for a people who died of political correctness.

23 Jun

A whiff of grapeshot

The Church Militant Tendency was well-represented on the BBC this morning when Rev’d Dr Giles Fraser came on Thought for the Day to tell us that the victory at Waterloo was a bad thing: “We worship the Prince of Peace, not the Duke of Wellington.” By contrast, he insisted, Napoleon was a good thing. If he had won and taken over in England, he would have abolished the nobility and we would have had no more of all that reactionary stuff about the Establishment of church and state. Fraser told us straight: there is nothing about patriotism in the Christian Faith.

It’s worth taking a few moments to summarise the doings of Fraser’s hero Bonaparte. He was no egalitarian, no people’s man. He set himself up as tyrant of France, killed four thousand by cannon in Paris in a single day, established concentration camps in the Caribbean and destroyed hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers out of naked self-interest.

Ordinary Englishmen did not long for the rule of Napoleon: they celebrated in the streets when they heard the good news from Waterloo.

Why does Fraser admire the tyrant Bonaparte? Because the socialism and collectivism espoused by such as Fraser always ends in the establishment of tyrannies. Where these doctrines are practised moderately, they lead merely to the impoverishment of the people. Where they are practised thoroughly, they lead to genocide and the gulag.

Never mind the history of the 19th century, Dr Fraser: just cast your eyes over the 20th century. Consider Napoleon’s heirs and successors: Stalin, Mao and the national socialist Hitler.

Actually, Giles Fraser is quite a phenomenon in his own right and deserves our close attention.

He is the philosopher-priest who appeared last year on Christmas University Challenge to demonstrate that he doesn’t know his Aristotle from his Spinoza.

Fraser is that former canon of St Paul’s who, when the rabble-rousing oiks from Occupy turned up, invited them into the cathedral and told the police, who were trying their best to protect the place, to go away. By these actions, Fraser not only precipitated his own resignation but also that of a fine dean.

What should have been the fate of the ecclesiastical-political lout Fraser? A posting into some decent obscurity would have been merciful .

Instead, he was immediately championed by the Bishop of London who proclaimed, “Giles’s voice is a voice that must continue to be heard.”

And so heard it is. He was given a new parish, a column on The Guardian – where else? – and regular appearances on Thought for the Day. He also turns up to parade his mastery of the non sequitur on The Moral Maze

Such a man should have been dispatched with a whiff of grapeshot. His hero Napoleon would be the man to do it, of course.

18 Feb

Infantilised pedagogy

I can manage only so much spiritual exaltation at a quarter to eight in the morning, so that’s why I needed a second cup of tea before listening to Lucy Winkett deliver her oxymoronically titled Thought for the Day. It began with that infantile pedagogical device, so beloved of the clergy: first, patronise your listeners by finding some item in the news and then stitch on to it a spiritual “message” so that we thickies will understand. Alan Bennett’s spoof sermon on Beyond the Fringe comes to mind with its “Life is like a tin of sardines. You open the tin and consume the sardines therein, but there’s always a little bit left in the corner, isn’t there? is there a little bit in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine.” Although Bennett’s offering was at a rather more elevated intellectual level than Ms Winkett’s contribution.

Back to the infantilised pedagogy then. She began by telling us about the planned expedition to send people to Mars. Those going would require courage and perhaps even a little foolishness, she said. And then she packed the real spiritual punch. Lent is like that trip to Mars. ‘Cos Lent too is a journey – geddit, thickies?

I weep, because this sort of stuff interferes with my attempts to earn a living, part of which I do by writing satirical articles for the newspapers. But, given the likes of Ms Winkett’s sermonettes, satire becomes impossible, for they are living parodies.

Best to stop talking about her then and think for a minute about Lent. This penitential season has become a consumerist gimmick. It features in the same sections of the newspapers that cover dieting and lifestyle. Are we to give up biscuits or booze?

As John McEnroe used to shout, “You cain’t be serious!”

Let us suppose for a minute that Lent is a time for trying to think and learn more about God. I know that sounds bizarre, but I ask you to entertain it, if only for a moment. How might this be attempted? In The Book of Common Prayer, the Psalms – all one hundred and fifty of them – are printed, a few to be said every morning and a few every evening in the month. You could read them each day, before breakfast and before supper. They are a treasure house of rare devotion and the Prayer Book uses Miles Coverdale’s sublime translation. I had a Jewish friend who could read the Psalms in their original Hebrew; but he claimed Coverdale’s version was an improvement – in much the same way that Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Proust is said to be better than Proust himself

So I suggest reading the Psalms. Then you can think about going to Mars – or at least you might eat a biscuit.

But if you must insist on giving something up for Lent, I suggest you give up Thought for the Day

16 Dec

C.of E. RIP

Ooh, we have got the willies!

I’ve seen some correspondence among my fellow believing Christians in what’s left of the Church of England in which they declare that they are dismayed by the determination of the powers-that-be to “fast track” the soon-to-be consecrated women bishops into the House of Lords.

Sex-discrimination, you might say, at the sacerdotal level

One of the letters I saw asked, “Does this mean the Church of England is busted flush?”

Of course the Church of England is a busted flush and it has been so for decades: from the 1960s when it gave up believing the New Testament, the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth and Our Lord’s miracles; through the 1970s and 1980s when it replaced the matchless liturgy of the English Church with trash and doggerel.

And so into the 21st century and Archbishop Rowan Williams’ last sermon before he retired in which he told us that “The Church has a lot of catching up to do with secular mores.”

Whatever happened to “Be ye not conformed to this world…”?

And now, and according to Mullen’s First Law of Ecclesiastical Polity which states that every succeeding Archbishop of Canterbury is bound to be worse than his predecessor, Justin “Oil” Welby has gone and cancelled the 2018 Lambeth Conference of all the bishops from the Anglican Church worldwide

Why?

Because he can’t face the prospect of all those wonderful, faithful, orthodox, devout and true bishops from Africa coming to London and telling him that he’s got it all wrong about homosexuality and women in the episcopate.

So what will happen?

It’s easy to foretell because we have the model before us in the case of the Episcopal Church of the USA (ECUSA) which over the last three or four decades has become so secularised and accommodating of progressive values that it has ceased to be a Church in any sense of the word.

The C. of E. is now only the politics of the PC soft left, The Guardian and the BBC, with all its fashionable causes from socialism-lite, appeasing the Muslim fanatics and the pagan fantasy of global warming

ECUSA – and now the C. of E. – are frankly apostate – and proud of it

So what is the believing Christian to do? Rome looks increasingly dodgy under the virtual communist Pope Francis. Some of my friends look east to the Orthodox. For myself, I am content to discover a little authentic Christianity wherever it can be found: a faithful Protestant sect, a traditional Anglo-catholic outpost, a chapel where the gospel is preached

Anything but this shameful, politically-correct, utterly secularised, completely compromised hypocritical, time-serving, contemptible shambles the C. of E has now become

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: Church of England