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.