Edmund

Golly gosh, I might have been a barrow boy from Smithfields when I was younger, but even I can be convinced of the pleasanter things in life with an invitation to some huge posh pile of limestone in the country to play croquet on a lovely lawn. Very nice indeed. Which is where we are this weekend. And while I am horsing around with the Duchess, lo and behold, I bump into a young ordinand to be, like a scene from Mansfield Park. He hopes to be ordained soon. I presume to give advice. He hopes to be ordained into a larger more catholic Anglicanism. I concur. I tell him that just as the little barque of Anglicanism floats in a grander n larger sea of international Catholicism with all of it's many rites and spiritualities, so too a larger more "catholic" Anglicanism is on the cards nowadays. It will be important to be both evangelical and institutional, just like the new world catholic clergy - and to be all things to all men, so as to win many to Christ. 

Rip

So the infamous first preacher of hate in the west goes up to the pearly gates this week to meet his just judge .... And also he wil meet shock surprise ... all the rats n vermin he hoped would not be there ... Maybe he will be ensconced within a high walled enclosure so as not to see all the working classes. Still, friends, Romans, countrymen, we come not to praise Caesar but to bury him. In the end he had a near death experience and realised that the real Jesus was quite nice n that life is about acceptance of others ... Even zealots like nathaniel. 

Swimming the Tiber - 2015 style

Dull thuds and groans and the odd screech from the dungeons of HMS Catholica methinks. The catholic bishops of the Real Church of England are getting tired of the lifestyle issues increasingly raised by the Ordinariate types and are beginning to crank up their siege engines on our ordinands all going over to them. One of their number explained it to me very simply and extremely tidily - like he was fresh from afternoon tea in a certain convent with a certain notorious German Sturmhaubitzer 42 Kardinale Kesselring - "You see Reverend, it is all very simple; Holy Mother Church has been reflecting of late since lots of young boys and girls before they swim the Tiber - mother river of Ancient Rome - and come over are allowed to date young men and women and generally have a social and romantic life with impunity while within the good old charming easygoing Anglican Church of England. Lots of parties, lots of dates, lots of romantic dinners for two in the dim lights of Oxford dining rooms - all very nice. But some of those that plan to come over opine with their few remaining gay friends that have already come over that the catholic codes of canon law do not apply to gays because the 6th commandment about adultery obviously only has men in mind who are attracted to women and to married women at that." I raised an eyebrow in the Pearse Brosnan mode. "But," he explained, "mindful of the directions of the Holy Father, we are now of a mind and it is our desire now, after the dust has settled with these high profile and exciting conversions, to remind such young men and women that a promise of celibacy befits the holy estate of ministers of God's sanctuary and that the codes apply to gays and straits alike. No strait will be punished without some gay also being punished for harming the holy rule of holy celibacy." The British catholic Church of England bishops are wise in this matter in elaborating first of all in 1994 the doctrine of the distinction between orders and ministries; then in 1998 the doctrine of feminine and male ministries; and now in 2015 soon to be the doctrine of the equivalence of straitness and gayness and subjecting both sides to the constraints and blessings of the holy rule of celibacy. So some attention now to embarking on the desert road to desert fathers and desert caves s'il vous plait. All change at the next platform. 

Golly

Golly surprise surprise, no riots this summer in old London town. Am shcoked and bemused - there must be a decline in the usual kind of old red canon in the city. Popped into a vicar in the countryside the other day and he was explaining that he gives the local children All Things Bright and Beautiful and reminds them that all is as it should be - a nice quietening influence is his lordship the country bumkin vicar - and the kids seem to enjoy it all. No dawkins lovers among the kids that is for sure - except for the oddity at the back of the class - I imagine Dawkins used to spend his days at school hiding in the stock cupboard trying to prove he was normal and not a carry-in and carry-out sort of ineffectual teacher's pet. Yes London town is very quiet - none of the usual dark black moods hanging over the city nor the expected rivers of blood that we usually have this time of year during the long hot summer of a 79 as Tom Robinson used to put it so quaintly in the heydays of revolutionary fervour among our dear west indian friends. Yes, very quiet. Mmm I must pop over to Woolwich and visit one of the local barracks there as London is supposed to be a garrison town.

Rev Simon IV

Historically our role in the Church of England was always one of conservation and preservatism - we pulled the huge old bird away from the private interpretation lunacies of the low church, non-church, non-hieratic protestant hasidics of Bucer and Calvin and the insane Zwingli - not even Luther in all his disrespect for the imperial power of the papal states denied certain catholic dogmas as dogmas. Still who knows maybe dear old Justin has a point in pushing the bounds of revisionism at the moment. It seems that a new framework and a new imposition is necessary for christening robes and the like, a new design maybe, as most moderns have no concept of what all the old biblical commentary means, except maybe Ratzinger, and even he and his german friends can look ridiculous as they pump out endless shavings and split hairs on Genesis 2 that most modern cosmic britons do not accept as anything but absurdly subjective psychological poetry. And nobody in modern Britain accepts the old stuff about either Adam or the old serpent and the old Nick because they have not had anything like a nice modern cosmic format for all that evil within the home planet. Too many old evangelicals and catholics pursuing old hat about a subject that needs a general over-arching rewrite. Is there a doctor in the house?

Rev Simon III

Rev Simon the other night - "Ah - the old Church of England used to believe in these things; the devil, the soul, original sin of Adam and Eve, and especially the vestments of office; but christenings are being reviewed and revised out of religion into PC secular protestant low church what-knot ville a la Geneva circa 1610. Nowadays it is all aboard the Trans-siberian express to the good ship HMS Nemesis waiting for all the poor working class christians at Vladivostock harbour, to be escorted to a glorious future of marzipan and dry white wine by the old cruisers, the HMS Aurora and the HMS Potemkin, not that Dr C was not recruited by elements of the old KGB at university and then turned into a "turner" once he had penetrated into the heart of the red canon system of the old Church of England. So once all these happy little christian working classes are busily piped on board and given peanuts and sparkling rose to quaff on board, then their ship will set off for a promised land, much promised to the "ignorant" little tikes that still believe in the virtue of religion, and thence. Oh stop there. This is not right. This is not in the script. The ships are not sailing for a promised land of happiness and peace and freedom from intrusion, invasion, and ridicule; but for China. To communist China full of total revisionism and endless communism, and they won't be feasting with joy on marzipan; no these poor little tikes will be put in concentration prisons for anti-communists. No what a shame; oh well, it is no change at Party Headquarters." Such would be the general write-up in the ordinary somewhat churlish and antique old fashioned secular GB papers at the mo - as per Judy and the non-churched girls in The Mail. But is the learned Dr Welby planning a more exciting future for us all - assisted by her britannic majesty and her new young crowd of fans?

Rev Simon II

Rev Syme - "Still in the OLD CHURCH OF ENGLAND, such votes would not be considered without consulting around the cities of both Oxford and Cambridge and then round Londinium. With copious studies of the Cambridge Journal of Ecclesiastical History. Also we would spend inordinate amounts of time preparing position papers and reports from history of the central issue - whether female ordination was always and everywhere a sign of heresy among gnostics, and whether the ban of women about gnostic church order of the Collyridians in the mainstream churches by St Epiphanius had indeed been lifted at the time of La reforma. We used to do things biblically by exhausting the references in the New Testament about such ministries - esp the bits about diakonia - and then canonically by perusing the FIRST EIGHT ECUMENICAL COUNCILS - AND THE HISTORY THEREOF. So one remains a tad churlish today about all this simple vote winning and vote rigging among the houses of laity and clergy. But then, the female feminists who had taken over such houses were nothing if political but maybe they had to be - and are these far removed from the people in the pews who just want to see the old faith flourish whatever low church monarchs try to impose on their sweet little souls? Am not sure. Such women as Canon Sandy and Canon Gill do try to understand that it was the people of England who had not spoken yet that we follow, since it was these ordinary clotted cream wielding lovelies who had preserved the church of anglican catholicism in Britain and Ireland from the worst excesses of underhand lutherans and calvinists and bucerian lunatics bent on the luddite solution to all technology and sacred art. You see, at the end of the day THE OLD CHURCH OF ENGLAND, THE REAL CHURCH OF ENGLAND, this was not just another political body of silly old gaffers unable to see through innovations or behind such political activity; it was a real faith where things had to be passed by the Bible first AND TRADITION. Even moderniste catholicques nowadays - those that have not yet been thrown out of koinonia - even these understand that all arguments for change over the other side in Auntie Overseas in the really scientific form of the christian catholic faith do needs must have to pass the tests OF SCRIPTURE, TRADITION, and organic MAGISTERIUM since these are the vehicls of normative revelation, BEFORE being passed or even being seriously mooted. So the catholiques do their homework on all heresies associated with excessive change. Are the catholics a bit slow? Unwieldy toward women?" Maybe but a religion is a force for conservatism is the position of the Rev Simon. Nobody phones the cardinals at London or even the lovely nuncio down south. Did anybody ask Dr Muller at the Holy Office for a report?? Such is the alarmed Rev Syms.

Rev Simon I

Well it is St Swithun's Day MMXIV and the custom as yours and ours does say that if it rains on this day, it shall rain for 40 days and nights thereafter. Custom. Custom as yours I can have any day, and it is no, nay, never; no nay never again, shall we play the wild rover, no never again. Such could have been the tune that everybody used to sing before the vote at general synod today for women bishops. The case against women deacons was strong, against women presbyters was stronger, against women bishops stronger still; but the women carried the day and the debates are pretty much over. The women won the floor of this debate. The quality of argumentation was a little better than at the rubbishy and gibberish laden debates of the 1992 synod. Women were more vocal - they had some arguments this time - they at least pretended to do some theology. Bottles being swept up tonight in Old London Town. Apparently it is an issue of equality. The feminist dons were much in evidence. The smoother lines very apparent. Fair enough. After all if one is going to create a nice diplomatic political church out of the disease of Henry VIII and the old rubble of the dreadful swiss-backed and bavarian guided anarchy of the reformation and one that is keen on preserving the people in the pews from the worst excesses and dreary illuminati gospels of the low church end of things from Geneva all with a political reading of Revelations 4, then it was high time to let the ladies in. Congratulations lassies; though this may be a superficial victory.

Still we must also heed a still small voice of warning from the back of the aula tonight. Young boy Daniel is calling out above the din about old Church susannah. If this is just a ruling for olde worlde feminism and the feminisation of all society, then we are back to the old gender amazonian wars of the 1970s faculties here in London. In these halls of academe, feminist exegesis predominated over weak men but all built on the old canard that men = vice; women = virtue, in the same way that children were abused on many housing estates of the early Dawkins and HG Wells kind that did believe in going to church in the sunday schools of the 1980s. Al-jazeerah and Dawkins I ask you. The debate polarised the churches in those years - kids were divided and ruled in polite anglican schools - and all this rested on an old division and opposition that is not verified in nature. I do hope that today we did not fall prey to an old oppositional that is often a sign of some political ideology penetrating the faiths around the world - rubbishing tradition and dividing and ruling first islam, then anglicanism, then hinduism, then burmese buddhism - and all through politics over theology. Very BC but also very much a Macdonaldisation heresy of the churches - that old bird Dalai Lama would say such hedonist men are not to be trusted when dividing and ruling western institutes such as governments, judiciaries, colleges, and even God forbid, religions too - such men like yon Cassius are lean and dangerous - they are merely men of passion trying to overtake the kingdom of many spiritual beings and even more spiritual children of Abraham. Still, ladies, let us not be churlish, for Men have been running the church of england now for 500 years since old Harry the Eighth built it on the rocks of his profligate hedonism, and all they have done is fold its old respect for custom and grace before every ethical and ritual agenda presented to them by the world, the flesh, and the old nick - divorce, abortion, contraception, gay love, euthanasia, paedophilia, animal love and so on - each and all was succumbed using hard cases as bad law; so is it indeed time to hand over to the ladies and see if they can something with it all? Thank you so very much Mrs T - but ladies have been running the NEW CHURCH OF ENGLAND now for 60 years since 1953 - and not very well. Gay churches are not good at confronting the spirit of the world, and their love of retail therapy weakens the soul, and honours consumerism and superficiality. The Dalai is throwing up.

St Stephen's Divinity School - IV

The truth we have all come to realise in the Real i.e. Old Church of England is that God has no favourites, but that the British are more equal than others. We have a mighty Almightiness at the head of the International Communion called Archbishop Welby and he would not be so slow to affirm such a principle despite his Clegg like socialist sympathies with the old left and the old Bill of Rights brigade from 1688 - just as the old left inhabited and penetrated first hinduism and then islam and then protestantism in germany and then moderate anglicanism in the 2010s, so too the Empire was great because it strove for 5 centuries to do what the old christian empire and roman empire before it could not do - it bestrode the globe and imposed order on top of so much chaos - something like what the Israeli empire is doing today despite 500 rockets being fired by those poor benighted primitive children of a primitive socialist misreading of the koran called Hamas.

Oh yes the new archbishop at Cantuar is no stranger to controversy and has his work cut out for him now that Dr Carey the old evangelical simplicius has dissociated himself from official obsessions of the catholic left and anglican far-right in challenging governments on dignitas in dying tickets. Yet, it would be foolish of Dr Welby to refuse a nice dialogue with Dr Carey on Dignitas since that evangelical prelate is known for his simple evangelical purity. Dr Welby might learn something from him - he cannot be all wrong on the notion of consent - as so many older people are tired of living in monastic style houses called nursing homes. Luther would be laughing in his puritan grave - having turned all the monks and nuns out of the monasteries and convents and marrying one and then turning the whole municipium city-state into a monastery through black-and-white puritan MaccieD republicanism. These poor old tired seniors were not made for indignities and manhandling - why not simply ask the old boys and girls what they wish for out of life? Yes Dr Welby is a good egg when he listens and he can build the case for dialogue with the caring Dr Carey. Catholic leftwingers who are always kicking in MPs on gynaecology, absurd contraception arguments, euthanasia, adoption, definitions of marriage and so on; these are just political movements doing politics - few even understand the nuances of official teaching in the final redaction of the 1992 catechism - the latin text of the textus finalis of the CCC. And few of them care - since the object of their exercise is kicking in governments of the neocon right and not the advancement of religious faith - and so they end up largely ignoring the cleverness of the final text of such gospel magna cartas. They simply use the simple flocks to further their own political agendas. One hopes that Dr Welby will avoid the pitfalls to right and left of this debate.

St Stephen's Divinity School - III

I was sitting out in a gorgeous vicarage garden not long ago up north, far beyond the smoggy confines of Old London Town, with a remarkable young vicar, who is trying to keep his whole country collection of small villages from lapsing into dreadful Geneva style Calvinism with all its sickly denials of things sacramental in our beautiful churches of the South Downs of the South Riding, south of York, when my esteemed and very youthful colleague on the handsome vicar calendar circuit pouted up and explained, as he was showing me his alianthas and gerberils and lilies and the like around his newly planted border, that blogs are like gardens - they need something exciting like a Venus Fly Catcher, and it thuswise occurred to us that this blog from the Rev Simon should now be rechristened and called not so much THE REAL CHURCH OF ENGLAND as THE OLD CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

This was also the assertion of the Rev GG for whom it was not so much the assertion of the old medieval catholique church before that dreadful misanthrope Henry VIII got his disease-bag mits on it all that counted but rather the old church of England that all country vicars used to know and love in the old days of Nineteen Thirties Britain when it was all unspoilt by those disgusting german bombs all over our beautiful 1707 cities. It was a mistake, the Rev GG opined very solemnly, while pouring his second cup of regimental Ceylon tea, that we went to war at all against the das machine-like Germans, and that we should have listened to Edward VIII and so on and so on. I looked up into the azure skies and thought ruefully of dear old young Prince Charles and his inspiring reading from Ephesians 6 at the D-Day memorial Service in Normandie and the lovely speech of young Prince William too on that day with his pretty bride.

We reasoned it all out, over tea and cucumber sandwiches on the lawns I would have you know, and there we have it - we both resolved that we would write an old fashioned letter of some import to our esteemed friend in foreign climes in the Med on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the beaches of Malta, the dear old Rev Simon, to this effect, a) that a calendar of handsome vicars and feminine canons at St Paul's be drawn up, but b) Germans should be generally apologised to for our being so overly attached to ridiculosities like cavalry-ridden aristocrat Poland, and c) more importantly for the survival of the churches, namely that the blog which everyone is reading as if a rage in Kensington should be renamed THE OLD CHURCH OF ENGLAND  - the church of england of daily anonymous tea on the eponymous lawns.

St Stephen's Divinity School - II

The Stephano Divinity School was a hive of the finest practical jokers that the churches ever did see. Say for instance the story of one now very senior leading cleric, now ensconced in that other place and possibly episcopal material forsooth very soon, who decided to relieve the boredom and grave intensity of the nightly vespers service which had been taken over by the young traditionaliste sicarii solemnly chanting their Nigra sum and Duo seraphims of Monteverdi - as president he clacked down the aisle with the formal solemn procession but in stiletto heels and when he got into his stall-sedilla, kicked off the shoes and said very audibly to the massed and murderous ranks of the riggie rigatonis - "thank God I can kick off these shoes - these heels are killing me!" Boy we have laughed and laughed and laughed at this story in his old posh rectory in the countryside near Didcot. So all good and all amusing stuff at the Oxford Divinity School in those happy days, in that golden age when all older men knew how to take the steam out of riggie style take-overs of public services. The good old Church of England - boy did we have some fun in those happy years. Red canons and psychological stereotyping as standard in the sausage machines we call divinity schools alas have taken over all such happy Brideshead quads. And all now wears sovman's smell and sovman's smudge, with enormous apologies the great jesuit poet Hopkins. 

St Stephen's Divinity School - I

Truth is, in these sad old days, when all the rectorships are being taken over by the glamorous ladies of the vicars like Canon Sandy or Canon Rachel or Canon Gillian, is that I personally miss the great fun and huge ripping yarns we used to have at St Stephen's Divinity School at some academic pile now called Oxonia. Yes those were the golden days. I fondly recall, and this is a story that my local vicar retells with gargantuan amusement, how one young ordinand from the Divinity School went to see the rector in his office about all the amusing camp jokes fired around those supine quads, and said, "there are too many camp clergy in this schola metaphysica Fr dear Fr." To which the wise old bird and eagle aquiline nose plus half-moon spectacles of the principal, who is now a learned divine bishop by the way in Britain, moved not one tittle or jot, and he looked over them at the young firebrand and zealot, and said, "Fr I am quite sure all these men will make fine husbands and fathers come the day of their ordinations - college is just college - the boys are only having a laugh." Oh yes, God be with the days when we had such fine principals and rectors who did not cow tow to the young sicarii of that time period nor did they cease ever to refrain from overly judging the superficialia of boys's college life in Oxon.

God be praised

Well glory be to God for dappled things. The sacrament of holy matrimony is something we can all be proud of in the good old Real Church of England, since many of our wedding solemnities are carried out with a certain gravitas and a certain bearing, replete with those fine and noble sentiments say in the wedding rites of Charles and Camilla at Windsor Chapel. With my body I thee worship. Like our proud posh public schools to China in these last few years, it is something we can export to other churches and faiths, even the enormously gifted Auntie Overseas, the Catholics of the old christian empire in Roma Eterna. Yes they have much to learn from us; our experience, our delicacy, our fine words, our elegant phraseology, in sum our whole demeanour as ministers in God's holy sanctuary, of enormous and grave respect toward any couple that falls in love and comes to us for the blessing of a priest or priestess - benedictio sacerdotalis. And why should we not also accord this grave respect to young gay couples? After all, Jesus like the Buenos Aires Bergoglio was enormously kind to young call girls and rent boys in the Graeco-roman empire all around Israel. His early faith gripped the imagination of the whole empire by not judging those of the temples of ISIS, as long as they undertook no longer to practise as temple prostitutes of porneia - the true meaning of the term rather than the later christian narrow reformation concept of simple before-marriage fornication. Oh yes it is time for a little latitude for young gay couples - and why should they not experience the salvation that Jesus accorded and extended to those couples who set temple prostitution behind themselves and embraced love at first sight with a single chosen belle or ball? Time to be open as a church, time to die to old fashioned middle-class and upper class attitudes that belong more to Hardy's Tess than to real on-the-streets industrial urban christianity.

Ahhhhhhh bisto adverts et al - !!

At the risk of walking on to the stage of history dressed in little more than a waterloo jacket, or worse a jacket from the Battle of Blenheim in the reign of Queen Anne, circa 1707, one is reminded in these halcyon days celebrating the magic and wonder of D-Day and the chicago invention that won the War, the Higgins Landing Craft, that it seems to me so much church discourse is a farrago of rubbish and trash compared to what should be going on - we talk too much about church and not enough about the rise of the soul to God. Where are the sermons about God as God; where are the homilettes about the angels; where are the anecdotes about ghosts where the British native mind is sensitive to the supernatural; where are the discourses about spirations of the Trinity; were are the addresses about the journey of God into the mind of a soul - where in sum is theology? Vacancies for Dustin Hoffman do exist and we are not talking about Mrs Doubtfire either. Hoffman in the last scenes of the Luc Besson movie Joan of Arc or what we would call Joanne of Acre. Anyway there is too much talk about talk, too much theology about theology and nobody in Britain has yet still responded to the call of Cardinal Ratzinger at Cambridge in 1987 to propose a theology of the human mind that explains the Holocausts of Auschwitz or Belsen or Dachau finally. Loads of philosophy of mind - but how many of the learned philosophers of mind of London Uni have gotten into the mind of Adolf???

Evans

Evans to murgatroyd, much water has passed under the silken bridges this weather, what with the local vicars all announcing they are just vicars or literally vicarii - seconds in command - to the local bishop who is the real rector of the parish, making them all rectors in commendam, as it were, which was the situation on the eve of the great Boleyn and Aragon reform in 1524. Yes local vicars were just that in those days, what with distant cardinals and bishops and even popes being rectors ex distantia for these little country parishes, such as St Peter's or St Lawrence's, in those cases Benedetto Gaetani and Emmanuele Sarto, a fact which compels some of the locals to exaggerate when they have a real dashing francophiliac vicar between their knees such as the local Rev Peter, fluttering about in his French style cassock. He worked for the Rev Rachel who was also a rector in commendam and the president of the local beneficium, but helas has flown away to the Antipodes after one of the local lassies at St Lawrence reported a chelsea bun on the rise in the proverbial ovens of winsome desire in the locale. Her lady boss was much taken with the news though slightly miffed that more chelsea and less bun did not make it to that privileged altar, where young Rosie had very publicly and very vocally worshipped the local vicar in his uniform. What some chelsea girls will do for a uniform - my oh my - it is like a scene from Vanity Fair or Sense and Sensibility - chance would be a fine thing. And to think that I used to flutter in there to that chantry cafe with my boy choristers from Windsor and salute the fine thing of many girls's fantasies. Anyway the Rev Peter has fled the island and taken some other fluzie with him, and not Rosie H-W, much to the consternation of the local chelsea girl guide brigade who had hoped to have a nice public wedding by summertide, if not to Gabriella then certainly to Rosie N in the absence of Rosie H-W. Golly gosh - what some young girls will do for a chelsea bun when surrounded by a nice flash in the pan uniform. Anyway off to the choristers for another round of Wachet auf.

But what

Well now we know what bishops are for. While the rest of the world is logged on to the good old Dalai Lama's website and web-blog, and the Crimea is teetering on the cliff-edge of some very hard decisions, the bishops of the CoE and the RC communities in GB still haven't even registered that there is a world out there begging for someone to read the signs of the times !! Where are the universal prayer services for international peace and global fraternity and sorority by the way? While Rome is burning, all these civilist Neros are twiddling their thumbs and talking to each other about their latest purchases from Watts and Wippells haberdashery departments!! Shame on you all for not confronting your bishops and your deans of chapter - when there should be a world peace shrine where true believers can light josticks to peace in each and every cathedral, and a world peace cafe in every cathedral coffee shop where the great and the good can listen to songs of world peace or CND action such as John Lennon's Imagine - shame on you all. Pagoda.

Oh the lex coelibatus

Well the lived experience of holy celibacy as the Romans practise it though is not a great advert for an integrated caste of dons let alone for priests. To begin with it often amounts to institutional aloneness, clerics hiding away in their presbyteries not daring to come out and socialise in constructive ways; participating in gender nullifying misogyny; cracking each other's whips by anticipating departures; breaking news of each other's compromises with good form; serving slavish reductionist ideals such as quadraginta annos et non pulchra; appointing then ugly housekeepers, getting a name for themselves as purveyors of the ugly; appointing large and fat and ugly co-workers from the female domain so as not to cause scandal among Jansenist or Agricolan or Febronian parishioners who are never at any point challenged in their vicious commentaries on young energetic curates; never correcting an official hermeneutic of celibacy as just misogyny pure and simple; failing to curtail the activities of official celibates who are really just gay actives oppressing women through old fashioned moral injunctions on contraception; appointing bishops who are a safe pair of hands because they never go out to socialise especially with young pretty women; Holding up as ideal those clerics who are good with boy scouts; anointing as seniors and leaders those mealy mouthed dripping silica led mean clerics who observe an official coldness toward young single women; marking the cards of curates who do dynamic work among youth groups and the female; cynical commentary on those that fall in love as if this were a public disaster; marking as defectors the records of those who compromise with women through heavy duty therapy; parking the notorious straights into vast bureaucratic self-help vocation retrieval facilities; questioning the vocations of those who venture out for a coffee with the occasional pretty young housewife; casting aspersions on cardinals even who have women as friends; dumping on bishops who go on holiday with female religious; so nothing is really safe in that world of old men's clubs which the lex coelibatus has become; and then they wonder why youngsters and children think they are minor abusers? This is the concrete praxis of the lex as lived out in holy huddles hiding from the world of women; I wonder if anyone can help out these poor buggers among superstitious Romans? Rev Hughie Jones.

Oxana

Like they say at Oxford these days - in between their elegant graces - there is of course that other place, referring to the other place of Cambridge. And so too if things should ever fail in that other place for us as ecclesiastics, namely Rome at the heart of the papal alliances and papal states, then we do have something resembling ancient christianity here in the twin islands, the church anglicana et hybernica of the old celtic world, or as Dio Cassius puts it, in the Celtic Elvish Islands - in insulinis fatulis. In those days there were many more islands around these shores. Something like the organisations that are constellating around the old English Roman Missal among the ernest Romans, though it wasn't very Roman at all in its poor theology, yet ACTA and ADVENT show us that mildness can be a rebuke to human intensity and excessive dogma in ritual matters of religion. No dogmas of the First 8 oecumenical Councils were involved surely in personal defection and abandonment of the flocks of once upon a time? Why not re-ordain men who have fled their flocks for some pretty housewife or re-ordain women into the ministry they once partly enjoyed in early churches like Alexandria, if this will calm such organisations among Romans down? Surely they cannot all be heretics on matters of mere discipline? Am I wrong? Answers on a postcard to Lord Cecil at Sarum College, nr Winchester.

Golly Gosh

St Etheldreda of Ely pray for us as young britischer couples contemplate the beauties of the lush green countryside in this wonderful sunshine, and pity those poor dregs of impoverished and deeply entrenched humanity who must labour for their bread in the industrial brown cities of all the satanic mills that Blake can recall. A terrible fate to work in some smog-lined city, breathing in the fumes of motor cars, and the belching smoke of huge trucks that should not be there, and finding the smog and dust and dirt build up under one's own finger nails at end of day - yes the poor suffering souls of purgatory have an easier time of it than the poor souls that work in cities. But consider this - kind devotees of St Alphonsus, that never was it said that those who worked in cities offered a poorer lot to contemplate than those poor wretches that actually have to live in them to boot. Terrible business. Let us bow our heads and pray for God's blessing as we contemplate the words of some metaphysical poet -
How blessed is he who leads a country life; devoid of trouble, devoid of strife.

Yes it is all a long way from Malta that dreaded brown smog cloud that overhangs the cities of London and Brumland and Manchester and Bradford and Leeds - all a very long way indeed from the bliss of the green hills of Albion too. But there we are - someone invented cities but do we have to accept them?

Like two blushings

Is there anything so fine as the witness of Shakespeare on the subject of two blushing pilgrims, and anything so nice as popping in to see church of england clergy in their country retreats in little churches in the middle of nowhere such as Blockley by Moreton in the Marsh where the old A429 takes off into the countryside and the hills above the Avon. Lovely location and funnily enough this is where the new runaway hit TV series on the amateur detective Fr Brown is filmed.

All quiet

Oh all quiet in the Church of England this morning - everybody has been watching Fleming one supposes on the TV. Very quiet - calm before a storm maybe. Can't think what. Pip pip.

Adolescent Progressivism

We all love the cut and thrust of the Sixth Form common room and the way that young boys will splay themselves around and expostulate al fresco on the latest revolutionary theories emanating from Moscow and Paris, but there are some ecclesiastical seniors in the odd common room in the odd posh school who seem to have continued all such delayed childhood development into their careers, by insisting as they do, that conservative vicars are not really acceptable in the promotion positions of the future; as if religion in our society was not inherently conservative for prudence and wisdom sake; a healthy brake to revolutionary change for change sake? Some leading lights of the various benches seem to forget that we are here to curb the enthusiasms of young boys like William Roper in the Robert Bolt play A Man for all Seasons - such would chop down every tree in the island just to get at some devilish opposite number, and then what when the devil concerned turns on the young man; behind which tree will he hide when he feels the full power of the great forces of Hades?? Such are the adolescence fixated young bishops of the red canon pot of promotees and they are tedious to listen to.  Change maybe, but religion is a brake of prudence - it is good to be conservative.

Aha - Stephen

Christmastide and the festival of the Theotokos reminds us all in the dear Old Church of England that Stephen is our proto-martyr and deacon, if he is one of the hoi eptoi of Acts 6 which few deny nowadays in up to date scholarship. More importantly Stephen Hawking is discovering what martyrdom is presently, now that he has denied that absolute event horizons really do exist around black holes as was thought to be the case in some of the more fanta-scienza moments of modern astronomy, with all the geeks and nerds cheering it all on back at base at Nasa. Something like our own church too where black holes have existed from time to time, like expensive back room clergy, swallowing up huge reserves, or like the building maintenance funds of various dioceses, where really the state should be funding all the repairs to these national monuments such as cathedrals if not parish churches. After all if it is a state church and they wish to keep it that way, the state should cough up the funding. Why should vicars spend their days and nights worrying about funds? A german tax relief system might be a good way forward in Britain - 10% of one's 20% of income tax to go to a charity of one's choice and so on. That way everybody is happy - After all in a new age now that the War on Terror is over and the Cold War gone, the peace dividend should mean no more higher tax rates. V - coe.

Letters

Dear Reverend Pastor -

I have thought long and hard since I attended the great Canon Hawking's sessions on clergy procedures, and have oft since opined that a new category of penalty of "bringing the churches into disrepute through excessive controversy" - this could be devised to stop any of the literalist evangelical clergy preaching downright outrageous gibberish not only about the Book of Genesis which is excruciating to watch and read, but helas also chiefly about their own interpretations of the Book of Revelation and then from a position of total humiliating un-reason, throwing up all over the Auntie Overseas in Rome - she is not by the way the whore of babylon that these pastors keep indicating, in their appalling inability to read the book in the original Greek, but rather, she is an imperial administration of the Eternal Christian Empire whose rep of the king of kings keeps all local and national monarchies of a smaller hue in good shape. Besides she only intervenes in smaller empires and monarchies as she says ratio peccati when some local monarch's family have caused so much scandal as to be a desecration of the original anointing of the coronation. We no longer need gibberish from evangelicals who have neither the Greek or even the German to read modern biblical exegesis. The whole situation is so embarrassing for its high decibels of utter and total ignorance as to make of my task as a high-church ecumenical officer an insurmountable mountain. Fountains away.

Wells next the sea

It sometimes comes to pass that learned canons and doctors of the law in the Grand old Church of England get into a tizzy or a lather about some matter or other which is alleged to be this or that contravention of the anglican communion's codex of canon law. What! everyone screeches? What codex of canon law? If one were to pop into any church of note on the anglican circuit one would find a copy of the canons of the Church of England, B1, B4, B12 and so on which amount to an extension into practice of the Articles of Religion. There all is revealed. Controversy then is sometimes calmed by such canons which soon settle disputes about say what is or is not a contravention. Sometimes this is about the grounds of transfer of a vicar, say for christological doctrine violations or aberrations in ritual or even for lithe and lissom irregularity in conduct unbecoming, and sometimes this is about the law on blasphemy, as per Bath and Wells diocese, though in the latter case the state might conceivably get involved, as my learned colleague Lord Somerset has it on his site, The Rights of the State, at www.blogger.com. Generally though we in the Real Church of England do like to do our laundry in secret, to iron out our squabbles in camera, in private, according to our own juristical rules and regulas. It beats going to the PM's office or his policy unit. God forbid that the Queen, the supreme governor, should get involved too! Constitutionally speaking the country is a christian democratic state, so the blasphemy laws and statutes do obtain for serious infractions of respect to the divine names. But we shall leave that to the Queen to resolve - she has some gravitas in an age lacking thereof.

How blessed

How blessed is he who leads a country life, devoid of a trouble, devoid of a strife. With such words from the metaphysical poets, recalling the glorious days of victorian Celibate Dons of Oxford, we can look down the valley here near Crick and summon up the life of a country clergyman, a life of hunting, shooting, fishing, and know that all such past-times nowadays are protected from too much adroit police interference by some fancy footwork among our lawyers on the right to privacy and the right not to be molested on one's own land. Christians arise - you have a right to bear arms in Magna Carta too you know - what is it with all this Dawkins police academy industry of persecution? And if such boys in blue rejoinder that there's is the crown prerogative, we can always ask them and their lady queen to pay the rents and mortgages if they are going to "get medieval on our ass", as the saying goes one believes around Hollywood this weather. Anyway, before a policeman issues a ticket to us, on our horses while foxhunting or in our landrovers while coursing, it is high time we made the point that all such ticketing is an invasion of privacy. After all, in our beloved renaissance Italy where we used to get all our inspirations for our mock campanile churches such as at Gliffaes in Crickhowell or Hoarwithy near Ross in the steamingly gorgeous georgian and victorian era, a policeman who sits in a motorist's car and without his hat on can be ticketed himself for breach of privacy. So there are a few little exceptive laws that can be applied with some fancy footwork from our no-win-no-fee lawyers - if only we had lawyers who could match the Italians. Auntie overseas told me that one. Rev Simon Godfrey over and out. Malta behind. Rutland and Oakham ahead.