Chuch of England

Dear Stan,

After all my adverse comments on the Church of England, here is a very illuminating piece seeing the religious divide and the very survival of the CoE from an Anglican perspective. It is so long that I do not know if you wish to post it complete, though it contains more thoughts on the "Sharia Law" debate which has world-wide implications. This idea has already been tested in Ontario, just over the border from you.

Edmund Campion, whom he mentions, was a very local "English Martyr" who ran an underground Catholic press at Stonor House, about 12 miles north-east of my house. Stonor House has been the home of the same Catholic family for over 800 years. I visited it a few years ago. Part of the James Bond film "The Living Daylights" was shot there. If you check out the DVD, you see it when Timothy Dalton drives up to the "country HQ" of MI6. I asked one of the staff about the film crew visit and the reaction was "Never Again!!!" Although all British stately homes are desperate for cash, Stonor felt they could survive without the hassle of another blockbuster taking over the premises. But then a recent Stonor heir was chairman of Barclays Bank, so he happily had the loot to keep Stonor in good repair.


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Is the Church of England finished? Should it be?
Peter Hitchens

I love the Church of England. By that I do not mean its bishops, its arid modern prayers and poetry-free, unmemorable modern bibles, nor its stripped and carpeted modernised churches, its compulsory handshakes, perky modern hymns or happy-clappy conventicles where everyone is saved. If I'm saved it was such a narrow squeak that I think it wiser not to go on about it, as the man said.

What I love is the wondrous Elizabethan settlement which refused to make windows into men's souls and allowed Catholics and Protestants to forget their differences in a rather beautiful ambiguity.

That settlement is expressed in several ways. It lingers in buildings, in books, in music, a sort of ghostly presence just within reach at certain times of day and in a few unravaged, unwrecked parts of this country. It also continues to survive as a body of thought, song and literature, quite immune from the peculiar bureaucratic organisation which currently uses the Church's name.

It is still often to be found in churches and cathedrals which - though sadly stripped of much loveliness - managed to retain and guard far more of their pre-Reformation mystery and art than in any other Protestant country.

It is to be found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, itself quarried from Coverdale's Bible and from the later Authorised Version, written in the Golden Age of the English language by people who understood poetry, cadence, music and memory - and who were concerned to keep what they could of a much older heritage.

I don't expect to carry Roman Catholics with me here, as they have long ago constructed a myth about the Church of England which is, like all good myths, rooted in truth but yet not entirely true. The torture and judicial murder of Roman Catholic martyrs such as Edmund Campion remain as a gory stain on Elizabeth and on the Anglican tradition. But Campion (as Evelyn Waugh's fine biography makes clear) sought his martyrdom and refused all opportunities to evade it.

Thomas More and John Fisher were martyred by Henry VIII, not really over doctrine but over the King's desire to have his first marriage annulled, something which might easily have been done by the Roman Catholic Church under slightly different political circumstances. More and Fisher, now recognised as men of courage and integrity, perjured and judicially murdered, appear on the most recent Anglican Calendar of Saints.
And that is in spite of the fact that More himself was no mean persecutor of Protestants, sending several followers of Luther to die in the flames (for Henry VIII killed anyone who got in his way, Catholic or Protestant). He was not, perhaps, the near-perfect man portrayed in that matchless film 'A Man for All Seasons', but his courage - like that of his opponents - is amazing to us.

I may be wrong, but I do not think that Thomas Cranmer is to be found on any such Roman Catholic calendar. Like many Anglicans, I've attended Roman Catholic churches and cathedrals for Mass (in which I don't take Communion because I think that I'm not entitled to do so, my beliefs being insufficiently clear on the subject, and also because I suspect that by doing so I might upset Roman Catholics) and for Vespers. But I have seldom found a Roman Catholic who knew much about Anglicanism or its services.
I also tend to think that the Roman Catholic concentration upon the English Martyrs ( the murals in the Brompton Oratory and St Aloysius in Oxford are particularly striking examples of this) are a bit of a propagandist 'you did it too' response to the rather larger persecution of Protestants by Mary.

And most of those who feature in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, the roll call of Mary's Protestant victims, were obscure and powerless people, not garlanded academics like Campion or great men like More and Fisher, but even so caught up in a great battle and compelled by circumstances to be heroic when they never meant to be.

The Ayatollah of Canterbury & Sharia Law

Dear Stan,

The great title is stolen from Peter Hitchens' "Mail on Sunday" article on the Archbishop of Canterbury (See below). You would not believe the uproar that his speech on Sharia Law has created in this country. Roger Bolton commented that he could not recall any religious leader being submitted to such vociferous criticism. And Roger has been covering religious news in Britain for over 40 years. Even the secularists have been using the Archbishop's speech as a rod to beat him by suggesting that he was looking to reserve legal privileges for the Anglican Church in line with the Muslims.

The main "Party Line" taken by nearly all commentators has been that there must be one secular law applying to everyone in the country - any religious tribunal's decisions would be merely ancillary and subordinate to the secular judiciary's authority. The British commentariat's "Party Line" has been so unanimous that it made Stalin's Politburo look like an anarchist commune in comparison.

Of course, this Party Line, like just about all Party Lines, is utter bunkum. Whatever "single secular law" applies in theory, the application at street level is anything but consistent or impartial. It has long been notorious that Muslim parents can flout the law on school attendance with impunity, especially when it comes to keeping adolescent girls at home. And as Peter Hitchens points out, the British Government is effectively breaking the law on bigamy by allowing social security payments to multiple Muslim wives.

But this is yet another consequence of the "humane" social security system set up in the 1940s. As I described in an earlier post, the idealists who set it up did not intend to undermine marriage and subsidize illegitimacy and adultery. As George Orwell commented in "The Road to Wigan Pier", the man who drinks a bottle of whiskey a day does not actually intend to get cirrhosis of the liver........

I should point out that Peter Hitchens is an observant Anglican, one of the few writing anywhere in the British media. We Papists have more visible secular media mouths that the Anglicans.

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09 February 2008

At least the Ayatollah of Canterbury is honest, Mr Brown
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

The poor old Ayatollah of Canterbury doesn't actually deserve all the slime now being tipped over his modernised mitre. Just some of it. Of course it is absurd for the chief of the Christian Church in this country to cringe publicly to Islam. But at least Archbishop Williams is open about his unwillingness to defend the faith – as is his colleague, the wretched Bishop of Oxford, who recently announced that he was perfectly happy for loudspeakers to blare the Muslim call to prayer across that city.

Even on their own liberal terms, this pair are clueless about sharia and its scorn for women. It was exiled Iranian Muslim women who defeated a similar proposal in Canada. They had travelled thousands of miles to escape sharia law and didn't want it in Toronto, thanks very much. Compare that with the Government, which poses stern-faced as the foe of "terror" and noisily jails figures of fun such as Abu Hamza while greasily pretending that there's no connection between Islam and terrorism.

Gordon Brown's Cabinet has also quietly agreed that Muslim men with more than one wife can now claim benefits for these extra spouses – while bigamy remains a criminal offence for everyone else, punishable by up to seven years in prison.
A
nd what about the discreet little Whitehall celebrations of the Muslim festival of Eid, attended by highly placed civil servants?

Or the incessant multi-faith propaganda in supposedly Christian State schools, where children known to me have been pestered to draw pictures of mosques but are given virtually no instruction in the faith and scripture of our own established Church?

Why is it that in Britain, alone of all countries in the world, the most exalted, educated and privileged have all lost the will to defend their own home? Most of us liked it the way it was before they began to "modernise" it.

I know of nowhere else where those most richly rewarded by a free society are so anxious to trash the place that gave them birth and liberty.