Re the church

Anyway, the real church of england continues plodding along. But is there anybody there in the pews who really appreciates us for what we do to stabilise the nation? Nobody understands that the archbishop of old Cantuar is second in the nation behind the queen and it is his job or her job in the future to articulate the ordinary feelings of the monarch and defend the status quo in a way that is reasonable and positive and secure. The church of england does exist and is still here - for anyone who wants to go to their own churches. These churches have been standing around now for thousands of years and it is only right that the state and the electorate looks after them with some Public Buildings legislation and works programme, as per Italy. States that do us in for not conducting weddings as seen fit by parliament should foot the bill if they want us to do the state's bidding. And why not? We are not vindictive people - we are open minded. Show forth your proofs. Convince us.  

Vicars beware

And now we have in the red corner the big heavyweights and Jim McManuses of Auntie Overseas Brigade (Canterbury), and in the blue corner the Giant Haystacks of the Home Counties Division (State dot inc). Either side knows what not to do. The devotion to the Blessed Virgin as the Mother Most Prudent arose in these scandinavian islands for a serious, solid, and sufficient reason - Ave prudentissima. And now both clergies will have to be locked up in prison for contempt of court if they refuse to conduct gay weddings in their churches. If we are the organ of the state, then we must analyse all this in terms of the state's good offices, surely? Where are all the anglican constitutional lawyers when they are needed? And between us, all because another article and farcicle upstairs in the Kesselring Headquarters near Frascati decided that she was fed up of her Gender Wars of the Nineteen Nineties, and now wants to start a new division of the western economies and churches, with her latest Marxist experiment on the west, the Orientation Wars. After this it will be the Unconditional Love wars, involving weddings to animals. Thank you so very much Brian of the doylies and Beda-driven venerabiles - But don't call us, we'll call you - in another thousand years when your big buddy below is finished being unleashed again on the poor benighted christians - oh yeah sure - thanks Brian. Thanks again Brian. Thanks a helluva lot. Besides the early christians and the young christ were kind to all the gay boys and girls and their weddings in the eastern empire between 30 AD and 490 AD. Why this sudden eruption of the chestleton-maniac politikon version of the churches? Another Lord Asriel that doesn't read his bible.

Spare a thought

Spare a thought Frs and Sisters for those few brave souls that battle on against all odds, trying to bring a little hint of high church ritual into small rural parishes where most of the PCCs prefer something american and charismatic and simply charming. These brave men and women bat on against impossible odds and cold parishes getting colder until finally they give up and collapse in a heap of public derision. We must pray for our high church brothers and sisters, and sincerely hope that they will find their true niche in the catholic churches on the other side of the Tiber. York and yorkshire are full of churches where young couples approve of a firebrand sort of charismatic preacher and why not? It is not always rational or mature or very deep but something of the fire in the belly of Jc shines forth.

Oh and congrats in order

Oh and it is congrats to ma'am and the pm for making another bit of antarctica into something recognisable and British, and why not, in a glorious reign that is now resembling that of her glorious predecessor Elizabetha la Prima. Speaking of the past, at last we now have an Italian jesuit who has examined all the recently discovered papers surrounding the provisional statement of the then holy father Pope Leo XIII on English holy orders in the ecclesia anglica from the time of Edward VI, and Fr Rambaldi has now revealed that the decision was made to null and void them only pro tem until new historical evidence emerged. The british catholic conference of bishops, sore pressed into service and hard work after being apostolic vicars, had put lots of pressure on the then secretary of state im vatikan Mgr Merry del Val, a local boy from Windsor, and a great friend of Queen Victoria, and he had been forced to ask the pope to pronounce a conservative decision though not a final one, so it was decided pro tem - until. New evidence now emergent shows that the convocation of bishops that produced the Book of Common Prayer had no intention to delete the catholic references to sacrifice and sacerdotium and only did so in text when forced to by the cajoling and threatening Lord Somerset, a bit of a Geneva-tootling bovver boy by all accounts. He was no morris minor was Lord Somerset. And the boy king was obdurate. So the intent to annull the past, or deny the catholicity of old doctrine, or to annull the Old Testament legacy of temple priestly sacrifice was not present in the minds of the authorising bishops of 1548. Hence anglican orders are probably all pretty solid - at least as intended by the prelates themselves ever since. And Princess Margaret for such reasons always genuflected when going into canglican churches - presumption was solid. Any doubt has now been erased by Common Worship which slides all the repositioning of Newman on the Big 39 Articles back into official prayers. Well done Fr Rambaldi and well done Queen Elizabeth. A good decade of research in Rome. DG.

Oh for the good old days

Oh yes, the good old days, when bishops of major sees were appointed not by some panel of laity plus canon plus MP plus police superintendent, but by a team of bishops in holy vigil and prayer, and then surrendered to the PM and the cabinet and then the Royal Assent. Those were the days, when bishops arrived at the highest of spiritual offices and dynamic missions full of the grace of ordination and consecration, but especially hallowed and sanctified by the good opinion and esteem of the icons of common sense of the nation, and fingered by the call of destiny. What today? More neo-jewish Political Correctness ideology from old mother russia, an atheist creed familiar only to the likes of old guard bolshevik spies like the Britisher agent James Joyce, and one posing as respectable pluralism, when it is in fact just another expression of the political beast that invades families which we used to call nationalist socialism. Hitler was jewish too on his mother's side. So no prizes for contradiction in the world of politics. East-coast Usa neo-jewish liberalism is not very liberal though - victims of these thought-process panels are always sent to some gulag at some Stalag 14 for clinical re-education - yissssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss it still goes on, and so these modern panels of church appointments are just excuses for more moralising of a superficial kind from the old school tie mandarins of Moscow, and full of stuffed shirts pretending to be christian prelates, when they are just invading red canons. More red dawns. More silly appointments. More silly sermons. No koine greek. No theology. Just red dawn politics in all houses, bishops, clergy and laity. Come back Carey, all is forgiven. 

Aha sweet Lord we pray

Oh lord won't you buy me a mercedes benz, and this is one reason why poor boys and poor jacks are elevated to the purple in history, just to give them a better standing among their peers, and to show that the episcopal appointments committee is not wholly given over to the aristocracy and the governing classes, as they used to be called, once upon a time. But there are lots of vicars who are heading for retirement in the glorious old C of E and these are being tempted to retire first from us and then swim over the Tiber to join all the catholics, 1billion of them, in glory on the banks of vatican stadion, notwithstanding heaps of Ussr propaganda these last 3 decades about the private lives of an apparently celibate lifestyle. Still this does not deter since most vicars are intelligent enough about old style Eighties propaganda designed to destabilise western economies and churches and confidence building institutes at the centre of those systems, and they know in their hearts of hearts that the catholics do have a good system that allows for confession and weekly conversion and that nobody is cast out from the pale of the sweet Christ bar maybe those who pleasure for pleasure's sake. But the problem is that once retired and more and more are doing so, will they receive a kindly welcome over on the other side of the banks of the Tiber? Yes in Rome certainly, and in America, where the catholics are intelligent and not so servile to Boymac's propaganda in favour of women priests, but there is also the slowness of the catholic Ussr style bishops of the Kremlins of Dublin and London to respond to these sincere conscience seekers. The new working-class bishops are still finding their feet, though scarlette here would say that aristocrats make better bishops, and these new bishops, cast onto such forbidding British shores, are slowly coming to realise that they are nobodies on a forgotten soil, far from the papal states and their zones of interest, Australia and South Africa and South America. But anglicanorum coetibus has happened, so there is time for all vicars who wish to move over to consider the Cantuar retirement option - thoug this may close in 5 years time. So tis time to move over soon. Only we regret all this here on holy anglicana and the via media, since we started ordaining women to keep the queen happy. Maybe we should have. But we are losing most vicars. They do have some theology and some scripture. And some even have a bit of church history. A woman with just an O level and an A level in religious studies does not inspire confidence in motioning forward such old gnostic debates. Still we plod on. Our friend chestleton has slowed up the process over on the Tiber by imposing a temporary if not permanent block to this innovation, so he may win this debate long term. In the early churches there were many ministries that were open to women - prostasis, mathetes, didaskolon, diakonissa, katechista, presbytides, glossolator, interpres - though chestleton says these above were just ministries as per I corinthians, and not the 6 major orders of governance, diakonos, presbyteros, episkopos, metropolitanos, huper-diakonon ie cardinales, and princeps or papa-imperator.

And so many thanks

Aussies. Hmmm. Well I am sitting at my desk at the church chantry building, nr Crick, toasting both the willowy Rev Simon Godfrey and the svelte Rev Joseph Loveday, two wonderful old vicar friends of mine who are hoping to swim the Tiber in Tibet poor things, and sipping my mug of colombian coffee at the moment and praising God that the Farc rebels will no longer interrupt my international flows of precious colombian chocolate style coffee, and here on my desk is a letter from a chief wallah in Whitehall filled with fulminating rage about aussies pressing their suits on our monarch so to speak. I shall represent it in full at some point, but basically it says, why do we tolerate men in grey suits in aussie-land who have no respect for an honourable woman like young Miss Katie? Between us, between you and me, in the old days, the first person to rise to the white rage of the pulpit on the privacy rights of our monarchy families would have been the archbishop of Canterbury as the young princess's Merlin, but I see that central GHQ-anglicana has been listening to too many faceless soviet style eurocrats in other vaticanese churches for just too long. Te Russian Tsar Validimir cannot stand them all, all these old grey dinosaur type hangers-on from Tashkent, but they still mope around Brussels and Rome helas. Roll on Justin - come to our aid who have recourse to thee.

Mm well that's theory n praxis

Well that is the theory behind British monarchy, religion, and consecration and anointing. Though it has to be said that down the centuries, since Boleyn and her boyo, the papal states have always asked for prudence on the part of the ecclesia anglicana and even of respect for them on the part of the ecclesia anglica. So in these debates about ordination of the girlies, the vatikanstadt will sometimes say things like - go easy and be careful how you reason the thing. The state is on your backs, so be prudent, and above theological first, political second, since you are supposed to be a church and not any extension of the NHS. And all because, the German high command knows that - a) the ordinary British punter is not keen on badly communicated vatican edict as per the Warlock bodge-up of the jazz surrounding humanae vitae; b) nor is the GB public that keen on lutheran cromwellian republicanism; c) the anglican hierarchy should always drift back to prudence in tradition; d) the orthodox eastern churches are not all that keen on departures from tradition unless closely reasoned with entirely and only scriptural and theological arguments. The greatest treason being to do the right thing for the wrong reason - T S Eliot. That is how official high command of the papal states overseas sees the matter. So maybe the general synod is right to put on the breaks again for a little while. Besides, all the older boyo vicars have yet to submit their reports on how the girlie vicars are actually faring and surviving in practice. That jury is still out. More anon. 

Mmm a shame

Well it is a shame that the vote for extending the holy orders of bishop to women from deacon to presbyterate to episcopate was rejected last night. C'est la vie. All this will come in time one assumes, once the overall vision is corrected. We are going to look silly in a space age if the ban continues.

DG

Thank God at last, the new bishop-elect arch of Cantuar has signalled that he will resolve all this useless absurdity about ordaining women as bishops, as if we were ordaining heretics or occultists or something!! What is the matter with the Old Church of England at the moment on this issue? They ordained deacons as deaconesses years ago, priests as priestesses decades ago, so why baulk now at bishops as bishopesses? A Logic O level for everyone at Oxford please. For goodness sake, the Queen Elizabeth II herself, when she is not canonising her own illustrious and gorgeous predecessor in Elizabeth I, is more or less ordained as the monarch, supreme font of spiritual and temporal power as well as overarching temporal governor of the Real Church of England, and wears a cope and stole before coronation. Yes babies in the old fashioned and out of date Old Church of England - she wears a cope and a stole before coronation. Wake up please misogynistic time-serving vicars. If you don't like it, then off you go, and retire from public life into the old catholic religion of the simplefolk. Goodbye. You have signed up for a ticket to Moscow, so there is no getting off at Warsaw. So why all this kerfuffle about something that should be entirely natural? This is a disciplinary issue and not a theological or dogmatic one - it can never achieve the status of a definition and its commission can never become a heresy. It is not a heresy to ordain women to a woman's church presided over by a woman and involving mostly women on all given sundays! Are we all mad in the Old Church of England? It is a women's church for Pete's sake. So thanks be to God we have a new bishop called Justin who will move the whole process on further DV. And women make very good vicars by the way - very multi-tasking, very organised, very open.  

Golly gosh

Ahhhhhh some time at last after a busy day at the church offices to sit down at the vicarage on the terrazza and have some hot crumpets soup and tea. Oh golly, am truly evacuated of all meaning after a long day explaining the meaning of life to all and sundry. Anyway, nice to have the new arch of Cantuar on board. Seems nice enough, though one imagines he will carefully wish to steer the barque of Anglicana out to sea again , but this time for some few nautical miles in the direction of Geneva. Well enough, though the rank and file do want their saints canonised and we have a nice crop to choose from here in the Jolly Hockeysticks Version of the Church of England, as in historical figures from the past, decently deceased a good 10 years plus, and featuring such mentors as Queen Elizabeth I, Henry VI, Henry V, Charles I, Queen Victoria, and some notables too from ordinary life such as dear old Dr Ramsey. Yes we can do all this at General Synod on a 4/5ths vote plus the Royal Assent, and I am sure Ma'am will agree since her protestant oath is not a theological one but a political one - just keeping the wolves of Madrid from the door and even the odd fox from the Papal States. Gawd bless her ladyship and her courtiers. 

Aha good news

Bp Welby has been selected by the church appointments commission as the next Archbishop of Canterbury, so it is welcomed as good news all round. Though he looks like another olde worlde clone of the articulate Bp Christopher Hill and the stale grey arabian Bp Kevin Macdonald, he is in fact an old Etonian or rather a fresh younger version, and then a Cambridge undergrad, and then spent a long time in the oil industry. He had been a bishop appointed to Durham for under a year. Fresh blood, fresh impetus, as all now hope, after the stagnation of the Rowan years with its constant appeasement of arab marxist agendas. So well done, Mrs Q and well done appointments commission. Bravo to a new church of england in a new england.  Ah the glorious fresh scents and sense of the playing fields of our alma mater King St Henry VI's Eton College.

Yisssssssssssssssssssssss

So there is something of an hiatus in the selection process for the next Arch of his majesty, what with candidates arguing the toss about the bishop of Norwich, while the police say that too many holidays to Lowestoft are not a good sign of portents to come, what with all stars getting nervous in the TV comedian studios of London. Either way the good old HMS Ecclesia Anglica continues unfazed and unabated, hardly non-plussed by the slings and ARROWs of heedless evangelical red dawns, and indeed proceeds noiselessly and calmly to its next port of call - Dr Sentamu of York by way of Beachey Head for the next Arch of Cantuar - and why jolly well not my dears? Our local Rev Noel Coward here at Melton Mowbray would say - forsooth 'tis time for a change.

Re making saints

Vive l'empereur, people tend to say nowadays, but if we are and independent branch and a via media, on our own times, with deeper roots in history than just in the reformation, that is with deep roots in the creative tensions between Edward Confessor and Bp Godwin, between Stephen and Lanfranc, and Henry II and Becket, and Henry and Wolsey, then why not establish a few institutes that put us on a par with the Overseas brigades of the Swiss guard? A commission for ritual that beefs up the sacrificial dimension, and a commission for beatifying saints, and so on?

Gawd bless us and save us

Good golly miss molly, as my housekeeper would say the word. Well anybody would think that dear old KGB Rowan had moved out of Canterbury's finest annexe for old bishops already! KGB - knowing God better of course. The point is why all this back room barracking and bawling and toadying so quickly, as dear old Rowan has yet to quit the scene at the old centre of the papal mission to les anglais or even take up his excellent offer of a residence at glorious Emmanuel where many illustrious international lawyers like his worshipful chancellor of the archdiocese of Winchester used to work? And this brings us on to the really big question. It is now earnestly hoped that when dear young William comes of age and becomes the next monarch, that the royal household will put in a request to have the said coronation of the said in the old coronation cathedral basilica of King Arthur - at Winchester, and not at boring old farcicle Benedictine vetting locations such as OSB Westminster Abbey. Who ever said that the future king of All Britain, like some Charles I, should become a monk and live like a monk? This is chicanery and the good lady Mrs Q is not happy. 

Well .... whatever

Yisssssssssss, as Prince Charles might say, as our commander in chief of Forces Anglican and Britois. The time has come thence to do some homework and housework. Can we really defy the statistics and hang on to all of these churches around us, when the catholics can do just as good, take them over, a good 1000 of them, or say 20%, and run them efficiently and profitably as pilgrimage centres and saints places of recall and so on. Loads of foreign pilgrims are descending on the country since the Olympics. The Olympics - Our Awakening of Conscience maybe. We as anglicans are part of the historical problem so we will never be able to convince a now more and more intelligent British public, and a public that reads books for itself like that of MacCulloch's Reformation or a Sansom's Dissolution or a Scarisbrick's Henry VIII, and watches movies like the natural-law driven Borgias and TV series like the Tudors, that we can be part of any serious long-term solution. So why not hand over, as a polite gesture, some 20% of these parish churches, keeping the cathedrals for ourselves for a time maybe? Yissssss or Nayyyyyy?

Mmm not so

Mmm but presidentialism a la Rowan too? Can anglican vicars really be trusted with the guidance of a church, especially without much philosophy between them? The queen is temporal and spiritual sovereign for a reason, for the sake of the common good pro tem. Wiser to leave it like this until our chappies and lassies develop philosophy in their divinity curricula. And can govern wisely and sensibly, without all the usual gunge from Red soviet ecclesiacentrism.

Well there hangs a tail

Well our dear departing leader, the great arch-priest of the basilica of Diana, as the site at London is called, is soon to depart, and wishes us all well on the good ship HMS Anglicana. He regrets that he could have done more to forestall any possible splitting over the Gene case in the Usa episcopalian church. But tis all water under the bridge - what more could he have done, good fellow, on such a tricky civil rights ticket as gay rights within the old faith of Cranmer and Becket? Gay rights are now de rigeur, it would have been somewhat mean-minded and churlish of the old boy to have marched over there and cast aspersions or asked for prudence to step away from precipitous action, or cajoled them that this would be a tricky step so early in the history of gay civil rights, especially given that all of us do have a right to privacy nowadays with regard to intimate, personal, and family life, whatever OT regulations about gay activity among sacred ministers used to say. Oh yes, Dr Rowan dun good in this latest interview, and showed great humility, and he is to be wished the best in his new role at a Cambridge quad. We raise our glasses to Rowan here at Oxford quads dot com.

Oh and lo there upon

Lo tis night and the church of england is not ready. We have all sold our thruppence ha'apenny bits and bobs to the rag and bone man and forgot what the concept of institute must look like, especially when society itself is assaulted by the forces of cucumber sandwich and the glass of orange squash, for the next battles will involve children under the tutelage of radicalising feminism, via the awful sites of Facebook and the twit. Forsooth, we are not prepared for this agincourt fair liege Prince Charles and we may need some lessons on why the church of england does exist as institute and institution. As Maggie Smith said of the young Lady Dowager princess Kate Middleton-Stowe, a woman only has a right to her opinion on her wedding day - christian marriage is an institute in itself which can waylay the wearisome drones of feminist exegesis. Verity would say - come all ye faithful. All people that on earth do dwell - as young farmer Giles use to put it. Or as the children of the far north would sing in their weekly assemblies -

I have seen the golden sunshine
I have seen the golden rain
I am happy to live with Jesus
And I wish to sing again.

Forsooth.

Oh mm

Yes we had this problem of excessive fraternisation between the church and state for a while in France, just before the French Revolution. Never good to mix the spiritual and the temporal - different remits, different manifestos, different briefs. If that is the word.

Oooh yass

Yass one of the complications by establishment status in the minds of impressionable young viars. They assume that they are agents of the state, and eve of the temporal order, though they are not supposed to be. Even in the suspicious days of Henry VIII, when young cocky Ann Boleyn was very suspicious of everyone that defended the old status quo and of course those that defended Queen Catherine's right to the throne such as the canon lawyers in the monasteries under Fisher at Rochester, there were lots of elements of the old faith retained, such as requiem masses for the holy souls of kings and queens in chantry chapels, abandoned for the most part by the rank and file of the lower clergy, though again, not because they should have, or were really authorised to. A low church Ecclesia Anglica (an ecclesia anglicana never really existed in english law - ER Reports) was never intended by the monarchs or the secretaries of state, such as Lord Somerset. Maybe the old lady is too low church and too driven by Geneva and Belfast these days. Also the separation of the spiritual from the temporal was also retained at constitution, especially from the old days of the Gelasian Magna Carta and beyond under Edward VI, despite the Act of Settlement of those around Elizabeth who were defensive puritans, and wholly unnecessary really, for the most part, since the ordinary people of England could see that the real enemies of freedom were not the papal states and their governors, but the puritans and their witchdoctors, hunting scottish queens. So old elements were retained precisely so as to guarantee the autonomy of the vicars and the freedom of their parishioners in matters of conscience. So a simple state-church was never envisaged by Henry VIII or even by the saintly luminary Elizabeth I.

Small dioceses and sees

Small CoE sees and dioceses have a tendency to do business through agents of the civil law, and their vicars are always at some police station or other bleating about some parishioner or some other church that is more populous, as if these dioceses were just extensions of the state temporal, rather than independent and autonomous sees of the power spiritual. A bizarre situation by any standard, and one that would raise the hackles of all the european churches, because it means that other churches simply do not trust the clergy of the CoE.

Oh not that again

The flogging off of the household silver was a permanent gash in the side of a cabinet once, used to much cabernet, much like the Titanic that became the dying career of Mrs T, but some societies never learn from her demise until their good ship Titanica is way beyond the newfoundland banks, and under them, like the new moderne Church of England, guided by Rowan and the red canons of the old CSSR, turning old churches into the vending machines of bankers. Where's the soviet union now archbishop? Bishops - indeed. As if such apostles of mammon if not maimmonides might know what to do with a sacred space built by humble believers centuries ago, precisely on the understanding that these churches would have presbyters in them that would go on celebrating the christian passover for the souls of the poor in perpetuam and ad infinitum. Who gave these bishops the authority to sell off the patrimony of the poor? Especially to fat-cats rolling in other people's money, creaming off the food of the nation, banking huge bonuses in swiss bank accounts, auto-authorising huge private loans to themselves, and generally honking all the spare cash and quantitative easing in the nation for their own speculations and their 101 jobber boys on the floors of the stock markets of Hong Kong? Duffy's Stripping of the Altars and Voices of Morpeth might be read slowly with profit by all above us in our vicarages. Selling the church plate and building a king's fleet in 1525 might actually turn out to have bin a bit more honourable than flogging the bricks of the poor to the filthy and the rich in their banks. ATMs giving glory to God - show us how, dear old father to the commons? Guy - come back, all is forgiven.

Mmmm

Yass in the good old days of the good old CoE, Canterbury used to run summer schools in church and state, and everybody knew where they stood, what the crown was, and why the crown had had to intervene in church affairs to secure the common good. Ah yes those were the days.

Not again dearest Rowan

So their lordships and ladyships of the General Synod have resolved not to resolve, decided not to decide, defined not to define, and pronounced dogmatically that there is not sufficient grounds for a new dogma of sensible inclusivity, and promptly cancelled the next move into the future of the good old CoE. Oh I wish for the old CoE when men with real theological acumen could just make a decision without sociological politics and survey driven reports entering every theological debate. All this indecision will go up to the House of Commons for the usual parliamentary ratification to make all this stuff amount to GB domestic law, and then on to her majesty at Balmoral for the usual Royal Assent. And what then? And what then indeed my noble lords and ladies of the hesitant left? Doubtless her glorious majesty, long may she reign, will victorious all over the ladyships and lordships of her lower chambers, and remind them that if they can accept governance by the supreme governor who is by the way a glorious female and therefore a multi-tasker and therefore a superior form of life compared to the inglorious and monochromic dullard dull-witted velociraptor male, then why can't they authorise feminine and female bishops, for goodness sake? Besides, as Ian Hislop has said in his wonderful magazine, we have been ordaining them for years, darlings of the Za Za Gabor circuits! But, sincerely, as we like to do things in the good old church of england, what is the problem? The issue was never, women can do what men can do just as well honestly ma'am, but who ordained the male numbskulls in the first place, when there were perfectly superior multi-taskers around for centuries? Besides, if memory serves me correctly, the monarch was precisely brought into church affairs in the time of Queen Ann Boleyn to deal with the maladroit excesses vis-a-vis boys in 1524 of those apparently superior and better educated male dandies of the lower clergy and seculars to solve the problem of male witless celibates and give them wives who could keep them on the straight and narrow, and also to address their cataclysmic inability to resolve simple reformation debates in favour compromise and common sense. So hurry on now general synod, let us not trouble the Queen for too long with yet more indecision. We must resolve to resolve, and devil take the rest - besides all the naughty boys who have consciences of an over-sensitive antique kind can pop over to the dreaded catholic overlords, and take an early retirement package from us surely, n'est-ce-pas? It is all a simple tempete dans une tasse de the, methinks. The Queen is waiting now ..  for a nice cup of strong tea, and not endless simpid coffee from synod.

Well well

Oh and as I was wandering by the river and the canal at some remove from the fair meadows of glorious Oxon, and thinking of Brideshead Revisited and A Draughtsman's Contract, it must be said, with fond memories of the Sebastian Flytes and Fritzes that used to grace our memories in the old days of glorious evangelisation through film and Tv in the 1980s and 1990s, courtsy of the Merchant Ivory collections, I came across two charming, swish, elegant, and urbane prophets of the cloth, in their robes, two vicars of the Church of England, now much renewed in all the country parishes and monasteries and convents of the new CoE OSBs, and these spoke to me on the butterflies of the meadow, the flowers of the field, and the birds of the air. And there in their company revealed that they were talking about Canterbury. I asked them, "And what of Canterbury?" And they looked at one another, saying unto me somewhat astonied, "Surely you are not the only person in Britain and Ireland this last year who has not heard of the great things that have been happening this while in the Old Church of England, how the Archbishop had shown himself to be a great prophet, and how he had convinced many by his words and deeds, and how at last he had been handed over to the porterhouse bloggers of Cambridge? Our own hope had been that he would assume the throne of Cambridge as mighty chancellor and thus continue unabashed." I looked at them quizzically and asked who might succeed? They looked askance for a while and then said, "Oddly the local bishop of old Oxon town is but 64 summers in age, maybe he ten who shall not be named?" We shook hands, concurred, and parted company; I to the meadows with the butterflies and my butterfly net, with thoughts of meadows and A Room with a View, a la Mr Beebe, and they to the Greyhound pub not far away near Rockley Cumnor. Thus we parted. The Old from the New.

Of a muster

Some of the local kiddies nr Crick up here nr Lichfield and the Beaufort are wont to sing a little rhyme about one of my previous incumbents - the lovely Rev Simon - and his horse-riding hobby, because he was always seen on Boxing Day riding out with the men at fox-hunts in the past -

All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things white and wonderful
The reverend kills them all.

A somewhat jaundiced and peremptorily judgmental position on the part of these kiddies who seems to forget that out here in the countryside little old ladies have to keep their chicks alive against the marauding and destructive foxes. The fox often does not eat the chickens, merely kills them, so there is little argument for the ethics of it all. Also townie kiddies have a tendency to adopt carte blanche townie attitudes to the country and so disrespect the rhythms of the same. So I would urge the townies to be less judgmental about vicars that ride out to the hunts with all the local huntsmen - it is his job as a vicar to do so and this has always been the case for vicars with cure of souls in the country. Especially after the decretals of the papal states banning clerics from becoming matadors on their days off.

Ah the scent

Ah the sweet scent of success. A royal regatta. A princess in scarlet. The bishops of the old soviet union active again. Anything to keep a revolution of rioters simmering for another pot-boil this summer. Of course if I were a mate with a few navy men or air force men, I might be tempted to visit a few episcopal palaces just to acquaint the camp incumbents with the seriousness of their remarks and their ululating phone calls to news editors, as more royal gossip is shelled out to the sewage farms of the modern internet based media. The royals did well, and the queen and the prince-consort and commander-in-chief stood for most of their voyage down the old river Father Thames. A nice extravaganza with lots of new flags to consider, but understated too with lots of ordinary folk and boatmen and boatgirls participating. Yes very nice indeed. But who pays the ferryman to shell out his Ussr sewage around Britain? We do need to consider cleaning up these foreigner soviet episkopoi. And a rich princess can always sue them. Not for their diocesan monies but for their private income. Via moscow.  

Oh eheu

Well actually, despite what people say up at chancery in the learned Dr Feever's office at the episcopal palace at Peterborough, your correspondent at Oakham and Melton is not just a simple anglo-catholic getting ahead of the pack. I do have a role and a mission here. Even if it is just to remind people of the good old days of Christ within Christianity, when he had not deserted the communists of 1992, when the faith was alive in Britain, and people liked a bit of the old customs, before Communist chinese style ideology came rooting in and upturning everything in the 1920s and then again in the 1990s. Yes the old faith, which the ordinary British punter liked, and did not repudiate despite the vituperations of well-meaning but largely unwelcomed low church types of the old Geneva kind - les protestants et hugenots du roi Edward VI. Not really welcome. Les anglais like their churches untouched, their altar rails, their statues and their saints dedicated on the church frontals. They even like antependia on the front of their altars. Not for them the luddite feeling for stripping altars and their dullard lollard passion for naked starkness or Edwardian communion tables and the ubiquitous flaggons of disrespect. No we in England like our holy customs. We like our Christ boy ni his Christianity.

And so

And so, on to tea on the vicarage lawns. There is nothing more enjoyable than the sight of cucumber sandwiches on the memorable lawn and the goodly lady wifey pouring tea for the guests of the vicar. Such timeless bliss.

Brutus orator

Friends, romans, countrymen, lend me your ears ... What joy what joy now that April is here and the Spring upon us and the sun is shining upon all our green of greenest lawns in all the vicarages of the country, as we vicars learn to listen to our Scarlatti Stabat maters or our Schubert masses. Joy what joy. The sheer timelessness of this primaveral Eden. So the old arch is going from among us and leaving us for poverty and penury in scholastic Cambridge. A shame. He could have saved a few vicarages. Those dioceses of course that still have vicarages .... and which have not flogged such sceptered silver off to the highest bidders. But can one really flog public ecclesiastical property and holy vicarages into the hands of the privateers of the captains of industry, the pirates of the Aegean?

Joy what joy

To cease upon the midnight with no payne. Joy what joy. There is nothing more pleasante in this little world of ours than spending a Sunday evening with a local vicar, dining out, nibbling on a slice of Madeira cake, and drinking a fine glass of the best Fonseca port. Joy, what joy. Yes the Rev was in good form last night. Lots to download. Lots to discuss. Lots of coq au vin, roast potatoes, roast parsnips a favourite, and carrots and broccoli. Then the finest slightly over-cooked bread I have tasted for years from his goodly wifey. We discussed the passing of a great figure, the outgoing Archbishop of Cantuar - red as the ace of diamonds, but lovely chappie, sorely missed already. Very nice evening indeed. The Rev was in fine fettle.

Well actually tis mete

Well actually Lord Somerset did have a role in the original shaping of episcopal debate and the production of the BCP, and the role was simple, to steer the bishops away from the minefields of endless conquistador debate about definitions and dogmas and synods, and into the calmer clearer waters of the ordinary man in the street sort of theologising. The protestant reform was necessary, or rather the henrician and boleyn reform of the years 1525-1536 was in fact necessary, simply because the population as a whole were being misled by endless speculation of religious men on privacy matters, such as the king's annulment. Somerset had to threaten all the bishops in synod in 1548 because they had a tendency, even Cranmer, to drift back into the old forms that precipitated debate in the first place under the unhealthy obsessions of Fisher for a species of Campeggio and Conquistador canon law that was exaggerated above and beyond the 4 gospels. Theology had become a problem of public disorder, and so as per today in the council of the catholics at vatican two, the state always reserves the right to intervene when overly religious men upset society and cause public disorder. Hard cheese all round on the trop de qua catholic bishops of 1548 but it was simply that or general disorder of a protestant geneva kind. And both extremes Somerset and the young boy king Edward VI wished to avoid. A protestant reform was necessary because sound men wished a return to all the lovely simplicities of the New Testament era.