The satirical magazine "Private Eye" has a long-running column "The Rocky Horror Service Book" which pokes endless, merciless and well-deserved mockery at modern religious follies. Many of the magazine's staff are practising Christians, so they know what they are talking about. The problem with being a satirist is that so-called "real life" is far more ludicrous than anything you could possibly dream up. So when you get religious services such as "The Ceremony of Divorce of a Married Couple" or "The Rite of Blessing of a Lesbian Creche", you are never quite sure if it is a piss-take or a factual report. In the 1960s a young British "theologian" published a book in which he argued that in order to survive Christianity would have to abandon its belief in God. Admittedly the Monty Python team started a few years later, but this book was not an early draft of a Python sketch, along the lines of the Ministry of Silly Walks or the Dead Parrot. It was allegedly serious.As one writer commented on this book, it raised a serious question of where the boundaries of heresy lay in the Christian and more specifically the Anglican church. Was this an acceptable position for a person who could call themselves Anglican? After all, an "Anglican" bishop in good standing had recently published "Honest to God". One intelligent reviewer commented "The most immediately striking thing about Bishop Robinson is that he is an atheist". Of course the atheist question could not be honestly faced without ripping the Anglican Church into countless fragments. Instead the Anglican Church has staggered on for decades through "crisis" after "crisis" which could only be evaded by fudging the crucial questions of Authority, Doctrine and Faith. You had countless de facto schisms on the questions of the Resurrection, gay rights, women priests, scriptural authority and much more, but no de jure schism.
This total disunity was one of the basic facts of religious life which baffled any informed Catholic who witnessed the Anglican/Catholic ARCIC discussions since the 1970s. Who on earth were we talking to, whom did they represent and how could the resulting "Agreed Statements" be binding on any but the faction of Anglicans who might happen to accept them? Also what on earth were the British Catholic delegates telling the Anglicans? Were they honestly updating Rome and how could the Pope or Cardinal Ratzinger play along with this preposterous circus? Of course, the train hit the buffers with an unholy crash once Ratzinger and Co saw one "agreement" and raised piercing questions as to its ambiguities. An appalled Anglican delegate exclaimed that they had been wasting time for the past twenty years. Well, of course you have, Bishop. Any informed Catholic could have told you that 20 years earlier.....
Obviously, most theological debate has only a remote relation to how Christians live their everyday lives. But the theological confusion still percolates to the grass roots in bizarre ways. In 1990 I was invited to a wedding of two workmates. It was to be held on the south edge of Oxford. The bride's father was an Emeritus Professor at Oxford, so her family was plainly far better connected socially than mine. I parked my car in a nearby road, which made me wish I had invested in better security. It was part of the unlovely, crime-ridden public housing estates whose residents mostly worked in the local car factories. Neither the houses nor the factories feature prominently in the Oxford tourist website and brochures. I wondered how my colleagues chose to get married in such a dump.
I walked 100 yards, turned a corner and it was like Alice going through the looking glass. I found a picture postcard ancient church in a beautiful tree filled churchyard - obviously built when this area was a tiny village remote from Oxford. The bride turned up in full flowing attire, the organ played, the families beamed, the wedding proceeded.......except, of course, it was not a wedding. The blushing bride had been down the aisle once before and Anglican rules forbid the remarriage of divorcees in Church, as Prince Charles and Camilla discovered. You had to be fairly alert to notice the difference - in one crucial sentence, when the vicar said that we were witnessing the blessing of their wedding already recognised by law. The real legal business had already been done in the local registry office, but these places tend to be as appealing as the Secretary of State's premises in Michigan. You want a proper church experience to remember your special day and take pretty pictures, especially if your father has some social status.........
The problem with these faux-weddings arises with the systematic dilution of doctrine on marriage; whatever clever form of words is used, the indelible impression on people who are not religiously knowledgeable is that divorce and remarriage are perfectly OK. Admittedly, the whole Anglican church exists only because a fat guy in the 16th century wanted a divorce, so trying to adhere to traditional Christian doctrine and accommodate the sexual frailties of 21st century England is more difficult than squaring the circle. It is like an old sweater unravelling - once the threads are pulled, they keep disintegrating.
The tensions within the Catholic community in England are not much different. You can see some of the problems that the clergy face in the weddings and funerals I have attended in recent years. One unforgettable fiasco at the end of 2005 highlighted some of their difficulties of conscience. The music group in which I sing had been invited to perform at this wedding. We diligently prepared and rehearsed, and turned up way ahead of time at St James. Father Dominic waited for the bride at the front door of the church in the freezing cold of New Years Eve....and waited and waited. Finally she appeared half an hour late and the ceremony got under way. Come communion time, not a single person came up for communion. Neither the bride nor the groom received communion. We were up in the choir loft, so by the time we realised what was happening it was too late to race downstairs and receive communion to spare Father's embarrassment. Why on earth bother to get married in church at all if it meant so little to you?
As a postscript a few group members waited at the church for ages afterwards to collect our long-agreed fee. A wedding guest had to go into the town centre to get the cash from an ATM. If we had not got it that day, we would plainly never have got it. It's not that we're mercenary - we sing for love, but we agreed that we want musical contributions to be valued and did not want to undermine professional musicians who need a serious fee to survive. Finally, two of the group went back to their car parked in the mall across the road. With all the delays, they found they had overstayed the welcome extended to St James parishioners and were hit with a £30 fine.
As one priest contributer to "Faith" magazine noted many years ago, the clergy who take doctrine seriously face a horrible quandary in presiding at the marriage of many couples. Can we in good conscience preside over a "Catholic" marriage when we are morally certain that, in five years time, a Catholic marriage tribunal will agree to its annulment? This couple looked a prime example of this principle.
A wedding at St James where we sang in December 2007 highlighted another uncomfortable fact - apparent compromising on premarital chastity. I knew little about the couple until the service got under way and Fr Dominic was inserting words that at one time would have appeared only in the Rocky Horror Service Book. Along with the traditional prayer that they be blessed with children, he invoked blessings on their two year old son and prayed for the strengthening of their relationship already begun. Plainly the clergy have to welcome repentent sinners and people seeking to regularise their marital status, but I could not help feeling queasy at the whole tone of the event. As with the Oxford "wedding", (where again the happy couple had cohabited for years before the service) the public witness to a casual observer was that premarital sex and producing children out of wedlock was no big deal. But, for the umpteenth time, I was glad that I am not a priest because I cannot think of a way in which I would have firmly upheld Church teaching without alienating the couple, and thus their child and future children.
With the struggle to maintain churches accumulated over decades of capital investment, in years of much more fervent religious observance than today, the Catholic clergy in Britain have got multiple overlapping and conflicting doctrinal and financial pressures to handle. The only reason we still have reasonably full churches is because of the massive recent East European immigration. And the Poles, Lithuanians and Slovaks are by and large not yet high earners so their financial contribution is not yet substantial. As with any business, no one wants to upset customers. Yet Jesus was seeking disciples, not satisfied consumers, and some people walked away from His "hard saying". He did not seek to entice them back and increase market share by diluting His message.
Funerals are an even worse quagmire for the clergy, with multiple opportunities to offend people at a very traumatic time. The brilliant funeral director Barry Albin-Dyer gives some grim and hilarious examples in his book "Don't Drop the Coffin!". One of my colleagues went to his grandfather's funeral service and was enraged beyond measure when the vicar got his grandfather's name wrong on several occasions. Admittedly, Anglican clergy have an extra hard burden to carry in England because any British person is entitled to an Anglican burial. Also, they do duty service at places like crematoria chapels where they conduct funerals almost on a production line basis and have practically no chance to meet the families beforehand. An extreme case for one Anglican vicar was the day when a funeral procession entered the chapel at the crematorium and the funeral director sidled up to him and whispered "Suicide". So you have 30 seconds to compose a comforting sermon on the theme of suicide for a congregation of total strangers.....
But conducting funerals for people who never darkened a church door is routine for clergymen. It is hardly surprising that the implicit message given at any number of funerals I have attended -- Catholic, Anglican, Baptist or United Reform -- is of Universal Salvation. The questions of repentence, forgiveness and damnation are mentioned fleetingly, if at all. The wise and humane old Roman advice to "Speak no ill of the dead" gets inflated into an evasion of basic questions about life and death and eternal life. One Anglican vicar in London wrote a wickedly funny piece on the gruesome banality of some funerals where the only touch of real religion is when someone's cellphone rings unintentionally and the ringtone theme is "Jesu Joy of Man's Desire".
Again, it is tasteless to mention money at a time like this, but like marriages, funerals are a source of income for clergy who are on very low stipends by UK and USA standards and you can hardly deny the insidious influence of the need to keep the customers happy. Funerals and weddings are also a possible occasion of grace for people who otherwise have no contact with religion. I know of one man who started going to Mass again after his father's funeral. Plainly our clergy deserve more encouragement, support and training in presenting the truths of religion and Catholic morality clearly but humanely, because the potential harvest is there. But it is not going to be reaped by soft words and evasion.
