

Well those nasty Roman Catholics have been at it again I see. Sneakily offering to take on board, re-train and re-ordain, some of our nice Anglican clergy. They’re going to jump ship in their thousands, the Church of England will be brought to its knees, all our churches will return to Catholic safe hands and Christendom as we know it will cease to exist. We’ll all be genuflecting in the streets and it will all become like those awful foreign countries with their tacky plastic madonnas and disgusting relics-nice to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Hold on, wait a minute, no it’s not the awful ‘Latin Mission’ at all: its the fuddy duddy, trendy wendy, beardy wierdy, trying to hard, wishy washy, Church of England that’s to blame. Yes, its them: wilfully ordaining women as priests, knowing that some people just won’t like it and then compounding the problem by marching gamefully towards women bishops and all the while diluting the strong meat of the Gospel, appointing athiest bishops, allowing men with silly haircuts to become vicars, colluding with the secular State that wants to get rid of Christmas, capitulating to the Muslims and just- well just not being like I want it to be.
Just a minute, its not the Catholics or the Anglicans at all, its the athiests: crudely arguing, religion hating alternative bigots who are just being really nasty to us lovely Christians and, well, haven’t got the point. They’re the ones to blame. I know what I’d do, I’d hang them and flog them and then kill them! Oh, no, that’s been tried before. No, I’d argue reasonably with them whilst smugly claiming that my truth is indeed better theirs and we’re right really, and always have been.
If I might make a plea for authentic Anglicanism over and above the caterwauling of the media and the anguished cries of those who don’t really care anyway, I would suggest that we are all adults here and that we enjoy an unprecedented and cherished religious freedom and toleration. The (highly intelligent, faithful and concerned) leaders of the Church of England, including its bishops, are confronting real and hard issues: the justice of equal rights for women , for understanding and acceptance of those whose sexuality is different from that of the majority, the problem of faithfully and creatively demonstrating a robust, credible and meaningful Gospel to a world awash with self-interest and greed and with the human outcasts these priorities create. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church also struggles with these concerns as well, but chooses the route of strong, centralised authority to address them.
And this is the real issue that faces us: that of authority. There are those in life who like things clear cut, determined and under-girded by an over-arching authoritative figure or body. For those who like their understanding of the meaning of life-their faith-enshrined in this way the Catholic Church is the natural home at this moment in history, and the Papal hand is held out to them. There are those others who feel that the whole of life is just that little bit too complex for strong answers and for clear cut directives: those who struggle to find an intelligent and sensible but real way through the difficult intellectual and spiritual mazes of life, content that most people share that sense of complexity and spiritual mystery and are happy to have companions of faith on the pilgrimage through life. The Anglican Church at the moment is the natural home of these people, but will be a difficult berth for those who crave order and security.
Along the way, there will be some switching of berths, some re-adjustments of the tiller and lots of revision and re-revision in our thinking and our attitudes as we react to the ever-changing circumstances of life. Pope Benedict has merely offered an opening to those who already find Anglicanism difficult anyway, and a compassionate way forward. Meanwhile, the hard slog and joyful encounter of the Church of England’s work in the parishes: amongst the tired, the lonely, the new-born, the soon-to-be-weds, the bereaved, the nurseries, the old people’s homes, the schools, the universities, hospitals and the ordinary homes and lives of ordinary people and much, much more will continue. It will be different and possibly diminished if some of the catholic voices and experience leave for warmer climes, but it will not cease to be and it will continue to explore the mystery which is life through the lens of Jesus Christ.
That’s why I am, and will continue to be, an Anglican.





In the parlance of my native Sheffield: ‘I can’t get my breath!’ For the past twenty or so years, the Church, amongst other major institutions, has been working overtime to introduce measures into our corporate life that will safeguard young children and vulnerable adults. We have been largely successful in this, and, I think, can be justifiably gratified that most church communities now have a Policy for child protection and the national Church itself has highly developed methods for filtering out potential priests and employees who might misuse their position. Mindful of the immense amount of distress and suffering the Irish Roman Catholic Church has uncovered in relation to this issue, our present day arrangements to safeguard victims are not before time and are to be deeply welcomed.
At a recent meeting of the Bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury broke off from his comments on worldwide Anglican affairs to say that, although it was completely off the subject, we should all try and get to see ‘The Mysteries’ at the Garrick Theatre. Not amongst those who would pass up any suggestion from Rowan, and finding ourselves in London at the Royal Foundation of St Katherine for our annual residential Lincoln Senior Staff meeting, off we went to witness this remarkable production.
I will soon be off on holiday and this year we have decided to embark upon a long cherished idea for an adventure: we’re off to France, the Somme to be precise, to have a nosy around the First World War sites. We had a brief glimpse as a family some years ago when we spent a night there on route to Spain. I remember with both delight and chagrin my two sons running around the still extant trenches at the Newfoundlanders’ memorial, pretending to shoot each other and die quite dramatically. I was delighted, because my sons were using their imagination to play around a theme that they knew little about-only the memories of X Box ’shoot ‘em ups’. I felt chagrin, because I ruminated that neither of those two young boys would have been able to run around in such a way had not my own grandfather survived every major campaign of that ghastly war (he was in the Royal Engineers): sometime after his death and a good while before the birth of my sons, I took part in our school play when we enacted ‘Oh What A Lovely War’. The cutting and satirical insights of that play have stayed with me always, and I remain distrustful of believing that every war that we are enagaged in is a righteous one. I am proud of my father’s involvement, as one of the first Commandos, in bringing down the great evil of Nazi fascism. I have less reason to believe that other conflicts that we have been involved in had such a moral authority.
So ‘farewell then Henry Allingham’, one of five survivors of the First World War and, for one glorious month, the oldest man in the world. Putting his longevity down to ‘cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women’ he also attributed his great age to ‘trying to be as good as you can’. He seems to have been a wonderful man who lived a wonderful life. Henry died in a strange week for the news: one in which the highly Calvinist Scottish Island of Lewis has been riven down the middle by news that the Caledonian McBrayne Ferry company are going to disturb the sabbath rest by laying on a Sunday ferry. The Kirk is up in arms and there is much quoting of biblical texts taking place. Interestingly, a similar fracas is taking place in France where President Sarkozy has indicated that he wishes to relax the country’s strict Sunday opening laws. Now, forgive me if I am wrong, but do I recall that the arguments around relaxing England’s Sunday trading laws were that unfettered seven day a week consumerism was already being enjoyed on the Continent and that it would be selfish of us not to join in? Yet another lie then to get us to give in to unbridled profiteering. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Sunday trading for religious reasons but because it has had dreadful consequences for the family, has removed one day of the week when we could all think of ‘higher’ things and not have to work and has also enforced seven day working on the most vulnerable in society. Hey ho! It’s off to the Garden Centre we go.

In 1994, one of my parishioners asked me whether I would consider accompanying himself and his friends to France on June 6th. His ‘friends’; turned out to be his old Second World War comrades: the ‘Hallams-Fontenay Club’. These old pals, formerly grocers, steelworkers, newsagents and such like, had found themselves drafted into the York and Lancaster Regiment close to the beginning of the end of the war, and became foot soldiers who entered the Normandy invasion in the first week. They saw and experienced many horrors: the massed bodies of some Canadian soldiers in a street corner who had been massacred by the Nazis being most notable. They soon found themselves in a small village north east of Caen called Fontenay le Pesnel; here they dug into their slit trenches and remained under enemy fire for weeks and months. My parishioner, Arthur, had the dread duty of driving a supply wagon to the soldiers at the Front. One of his pals had been killed on the road he used and each day he had to drive over his body; for war does not protect the living let alone the dead. After some months these ordinary lads beat back their unknown enemy (it was only later that they discovered they were a crack Panzer division) and the long slow march to Berlin began.
To this day, when I find myself in Caen, I visit the Commonwealth cemetery there and go and say ‘hello’ to ‘Knocker’ Lees, a doughty old sergeant and boxer in civilian life, who befriended a small, frightened young soldier. ‘Knocker’ was killed in the first few hours on French soil and he died at his young friend’s side. That young friend was amongst our party in 1994 and made me promise that, should anything happen to him, I would visit his mentor and protector whenever I could.

The jumble sale was just finishing in the church hall, so I wandered back to the Vicarage for a cuppa. Along the way, one of my parishioners stopped me and said ‘there’s been some trouble at the Wednesday ground, someone’s got killed’. I could hear the constant doppler effect sound of the ambulances on the top road which ran between Hillsborough at the bottom of my parish and the Northern General Hospital at the top. I put the television on in the lounge: ‘there’s been a problem at the match between Liverpool and Notts Forest. As many as six people may have been killed’. It was about 3.05, by 3.08 the projected numbers of dead being announced was 20; then thirty…then forty.