Christianity

Over the past few months, the Archbishops of York and Canterbury have repeatedly assured us that they love parishes and parish churches. ‘I am passionate that the parish is essential,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury told the Church Times recently. The Archbishop of York went so far as to describe the parish as ‘the beating heart of community life in England’. So why are they supporting a change to church law to make it easier to close parish churches? The paper which proposes the change is at stage one of a three-stage approval process. It has the unsexy name GS 2222, so I call it the ‘Church Closers’ Charter’.

I’ve just been looking at photographs of Emma Raducanu again, this time focusing on her upper chest. She usually wears a pendant cross, which suggests that she is a Christian. Yes I know that some people wear crosses for fashion reasons, but I don’t think she’s in that camp. Maybe it’s more a sign of cultural than religious allegiance, maybe a treasured gift from a grandparent? Or maybe a sign of solidarity with China’s persecuted Christians. To what extent is it legitimate to inquire into this? The orthodoxy is, not at all, you meddling creep. It’s her business, and it’s utterly irrelevant to her tennis success. But it is not too out-of-order to ponder the symbols that people in the public eye choose to wear.

When the Church of England talks of trying new things, I prick up my ears. Back in 2004 it announced the need for ‘fresh expressions’ — new ventures alongside the normal parish system. Maybe some vibrant arty experimentation would ensue, I felt. But the main result was lots of nimble little evangelical pop-up churches, mostly lay-led. The idea of innovation seems to energise the evangelicals, although their version of innovation doesn’t always energise me. On Easter Day this year I dragged my kids to church, but there was no room at the socially distanced inn. The evangelicals round the corner let us in, so I had a glimpse of a style of Anglicanism that I normally avoid.

Well, Donald Trump doesn’t seem so bad now, does he? I don’t say that because Joe Biden has turned out to be as competent or less, but because at his press conference in reaction to the fall of Kabul, he sounded Trumpian. By which I mean, honest. Honest that staying in Afghanistan so long was a mistake, that their government was corrupt, that if its army wasn't prepared to defend itself then we shouldn't do it for them, and that this is what a withdrawal looks like: horribly, brutally honest. The endgame was a disaster because America’s intel was wrong, so the US had less time to get out than it thought, and because Biden lacks the acuity to respond to changing conditions. Biden looks like Brezhnev after heart-attack number seven.

Pop sensation and slave-4-her-father Britney Spears sent papists into a frenzy on Thursday night by mentioning her Catholic faith to her nearly 33 million Instagram followers in a photo caption. 'I just got back from mass...I’m Catholic now...let us pray,' the 39-year-old star wrote. 'huge draft get,' tweeted the Atlantic's Elizabeth Bruenig. Cockburn thinks the signs have been there all along. Not only did Britney grow up in Louisiana, where Catholicism is far more widespread than elsewhere in the South due to its former status as a French colony, she's been dropping subtle hints in her art. Take the music video for her breakout single '...Baby One More Time'. How different the schoolgirl chic she adopted looks in the light of her newly announced faith.

A meeting in June of America’s Catholic Bishops could unravel threads that were sown decades ago in an untidy rapprochement among the Catholic Church, its member politicians and many of the laity who accept abortion as a matter of public law but reject it privately. On June 17, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops approved the drafting of a document that would teach ‘Eucharistic coherence’. According to Bishop Thomas Olmstead of Phoenix, Arizona, this ‘means that our “Amen” at Holy Communion includes not only the recognition of the Real Presence but also a communion bound together by embracing and living Christ’s entire teaching handed down to us through the Church’.

I am a key limiting factor. That’s a new one for a clergyman of the Church of England. We’ve traded under parson, cleric, priest, minister, padre and even pie-and-liquor, but never before have I heard us described as ‘key limiting factors’. That this phrase was used during the announcement of a new C of E-endorsed scheme — to create 10,000 new lay-led churches in the next ten years — adds future injury to present insult. ‘Lay-led churches release the Church from key limiting factors,’ said Canon John McGinley introducing the initiative.

Faith is not the declining force that some secularists believe or indeed desire it to be. Even here in the UK, we have our growing and vibrant black-led churches; increasingly present mosques, temples and gurudwaras; and believers arriving from Eastern and Central Europe.  This is why it's important for religious education to continue to have a special place in the curriculum of our schools. Although RE is not a ‘core subject', it remains a compulsory one. Successive Education Acts have stipulated that it should be taught in such a way that reflects the mainly Judaeo-Christian traditions of this country — while also covering the teachings and practices of other religions present here.

Here, in 50 words, is the reason President Biden may find himself denied Holy Communion following a vote this month at the US Catholic bishops' conference. The Church has always regarded abortion as uniquely evil. Biden plans to make infanticidal late-term abortions widely available. In the eyes of the Church, this means he's committing a grave mortal sin and can't receive Communion until he confesses it. He won't, so he could be barred from the sacrament. That's the essence of it. It's why 73 percent of the 290 US bishops voted to prepare a document that will clarify teaching that, in fact, was already set in stone. It will apply to all US Catholics, not just the President or public figures.

The Church of England has once again misunderstood the mood of the nation. Guidance published this week urges the country’s 12,500 parishes and 42 cathedrals to address, search out, assess and remove offensive artefacts of ‘contested heritage’. The framework follows the call by Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, for a review of church statues. Of course racism must be taken seriously, but I doubt I was the only cleric who, upon hearing this development, let out a loud groan. The edict is both a concession to advocates of divisive identity politics and a distraction from the more pressing issues on which the church should be focused.

In its new report, From Lament to Action, the Church of England has decided to focus on race. Now, there is no question that racism exists within all cultures, but the Judaeo-Christian tradition has always been opposed to it. Christianity emphasises the common origin of all humans, made in God’s image, and contemporary science corroborates this moral and spiritual insight. The Church is right to set its face against racism. Predictably, however, the C of E report urges an audit of monuments and an examination of the Church’s complicity in the slave trade. Why doesn’t it celebrate the long tradition of those Christians who devoted their lives to abolition?

Much has been made of the Queen's Christian faith in the aftermath of the death of her husband the Duke of Edinburgh. For decades, John Stott, who served as the Queen's chaplain, shepherded Her Majesty in that faith. Yet although his preaching brought him into contact with Royalty, led to him selling millions of books and even earned him a place among Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, Stott – born a century ago this week – remained a humble man. Stott lived in spartan simplicity in a two-room flat above a garage. Author of more than 50 internationally best-selling books, he assigned all his royalties to a trust fund to provide books for impoverished pastors and seminary libraries in the global south.