Pondering

Am pondering the fates at the moment like a pensive Vespasian atop his throne in far away northern sees like York, much like the statue of Constantine the Great up here, and thinking as to how the Old Church of England can survive the latest scandals at Canterbury, what with the Welby story now circulating, since in 1850 there were large scale defections from the Old Church of England in that time frame, as many ordinary rural people walked away from an impossibly posh church that was only interested in the new urbanised populations of the rich and powerful merchant classes and the like and which dominated the churches in that period. Impossibly posh, stilted voices, artificial liturgies, abstruse sermons, pious hyperbole, nothing about the gospels, little about the real Jesus, so it was not going to be easy to recover from another 1850 in this year of 2024, since there is a little bit more to reveal about the Welby scandal maybe helas helas. Bp Welby has much to confide and confess in this story possibly, so we have not heard the final chapter of this whole story as yet, more canings around the evangelical sector maybe to surface, since there was more to it than meets the superficial eye. A catholic scottish Cracker is needed. Am not suggesting that the whole fate of the whole Church hangs by a thread upon the whims and fancies of one individual since the fate of the Church is bigger than just one person, but we shall see what emerges. There is however the Real Church of England that is more than the sum of the parts of the Old Church of England to be sure, and if anything is to be recovered from the Old Church of England it is that maybe there is room for a Celtic style rapprochement of the natural law based candidates of once upon a time. Caning boys as an expression of some strange fantasy is not going to be the foundation or basis for future candidates for clerks in holy orders maybe, methinks. The Celtics can teach us a thing or two about screening out those kinds of vicars and jurists, vicaresses too with their feminista pliars, of an overly strict kind of once upon a time since they too had their moment of infamy as well in medieval times when the invasion force of the Normans under licence from Henry II and also the pope at the time Adrian IV went over there in the 1100s and imposed order on an unruly kingdom of bolshevik and gay clergy and the Norrman king took a nice pretty Celtic girlfriend to be his wife called to signal to the unruly clerics that the age of the rabid anti-natural law cleric was over, anti-naturam clerics were now history. Even the mild mannered English pope at the time was concerned about what had happened there. The council of Trullo in 600 AD in our beloved Constantinople too was concerned about such developments when it imposed marriage on all future clerics. So too Elizabeth the First imposing marriage on the dons of Cambridge and Oxford. So it does happen from time to time. Canings are history for us in the Real Church of England, how those poor boys suffered. It cannot happen again, evangelicals or no evangelicals. Our own reformation judges of the civil kind already had occasion to warn of the extremes and excesses of evangelical schools of the Baptist kind in the 2000s and 2010s when suppressing the right to discipline children by private teachers then, the "spare the rod and spoil the child" school of thought, or rather instinct. Male evangelical teachers running schools .... .... just like a bad episode of Cracker. So the Old Church of England can survive this public very public meltdown but there will be a price to pay. Boys cannot be allowed to suffer so grievously.We in the Real Church of England can take steps.