Assisted suicide and the need for ‘joined-up thinking’ by the CofE

On June 29th, the Archbishop of Westminster, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi wrote jointly to The Telegraph to oppose any change in the law that would legalise assisted suicide. It was a sane, straightforward and measured letter. Let us pray that they are listened to.

Looking to the Church of England’s web site, one finds that it now has a ‘Protecting Life / Assisted Suicide’ page to which a prominent link is currently provided from the homepage.

Is the CofE catching up on the fundamental importance of the Pro-Life cause? I hope so; I have sat in clergy meetings and been met with dumb stares when I suggest that opposing abortion and Euthanasia are far more ‘Gospel issues’ than some of the causes given that label by members of the CofE.

But there is no mention whatsoever on the ‘Protecting Life’ page of either abortion or embryo selection and experimentation. Some more joined-up thinking (horrid Blairite phrase, but it has its uses) is required here on the part of the CofE and its webmaster.

Tangentially, another place where the CofE’s ‘Protecting Life’ page indicates that some joined-up thinking is needed is in the effort for some form of legislation that may enable the General Synod to legislate for women bishops without appearing to unchurch those who don’t accept them.

Amongst the CofE’s objections to legalised assisted suicide, we find the following:

Elastic interpretations of the law: any law, however tightly formulated, would have to be 'interpreted'; doctors would vary in their approach and consistency would be impossible to achieve with ‘wider’ interpretations of the law becoming acceptable.

This is absolutely true. But substitute ‘bishops’ for ‘doctors’ in the above and apply it to absolutely any form of women bishops legislation that tries to accommodate those opposed, and a reasonable inference is that trying to find some form of such legislation may ultimately be in vain.

Independence Day 2009

A brief return, it being July 4th, to one of the inaugural themes of this blog – that I who have lived in the UK for all but the first five years of my life and was born of English parents but in upstate New York – retain a sense of being rather more than simply, as someone recently put it, ‘technically American’.

I know that to some people my claim to being American seems a little far-fetched, but one way I think of it is this.

St Paul was a Jew. He is a Roman citizen by birth while being nonetheless a Jew by birth and religion and latterly the Apostle of Christ to the Gentiles. His earthly citizenship was separate from his Christian citizenship – as is expressed in the letter to the Philippians.

Being English–Anglican (ie, CofE) binds up one’s religious identity with national and cultural identity in a way enshrines semi-detachment from the rest of Christendom and confinement in a somewhat little-Englander version of Christianity, which is, if you want it in a word, instinctively Erastian.

By identifying – as the US government affirms by having issued me with a birth certificate – that I am an American citizen by birth, I take a conscious step away from little Englander-ness culturally and historically and accept an identity which cannot be so closely tied to one race, history or culture. It is, in the purely dictionary sense of ‘universal’, more catholic.

In terms of ecclesial identity, I remain however a little Englander, which is best described as problematic, but work in progress.

Pre-nups ‘just like house insurance’

Thanks to some recent judgement or other, ‘pre-nups’ – the increasingly fashionable agreements made by couples in advance of their wedding as to how things are going to be divvied up to keep the divorce that bit less messy – have gotten a bit more status.

This is, according to the giggly lawyeress on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning, a good thing! In fact, she bubbled, it is just like house insurance – after all you don’t want to come home one day and find that there’s been a fire and you’re not insured; why regard the end of a marriage any differently?

For one thing, having house insurance doesn’t actually make your house any more likely to burn down, whereas I would suggest that a pre-nup does make your marriage more likely to fail. Marriages are not always easy, for all sorts of endogenous and exogenous factors that may be acute or chronic, and if there is a pre-agreed way out, many people in our instant-gratification / instant-affirmation society will take the opportunity to bale out by the simplest route rather than honour the vows they made and work through whatever the pressures are, with their spouse.

But, even more than that, starting a marriage having already planned how to end it sounds to me like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s not happened yet, but if I were to find that a couple asking to be married by me had a pre-nup, I’d want to see it torn up before we went any further. Otherwise, I just wouldn’t be confident that they were serious.

UPDATE – scanning around the blogs, I’ve found pre-nups described as inter alia a ‘condom for ypur financial assets’. … Don’t get me started …

Two celebrations of priesthood

Oxford yesterday evening for the celebration of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet’s 25th anniversary of Ordination to the priesthood at St Barnabas, Oxford – attended by around a hundred and fifty family, friends and clergy (UPDATE: official count was 153 communicants, so around 200 in church). Celebration versus Dominum, liturgical music supported by Oxford Pro Musica – the Epistle sung by the parish priest, Fr Jonathan Beswick, as sub-deacon. It all, down to the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, spoke of the long-overdue Reform of the Reform.

Use of Bishop Andrew’s arrangement of the Anima Christi was welcome and appropriate – his musicianship (his pre-Ordination trade) doesn’t get many outings.

My pictures are dodgy – the lights weren’t on, probably so as not to cook the congregation on an already oppressively hot night – and using flash photography during the liturgy is generally close to mortal sin in my book, so I’ll just call them ‘atmospheric’.

The Bishop of Richborough – Ernie Wise to the Bishop of Ebbsfleet’s Eric Morecambe (his joke, not mine) – preached. I wasn’t sure where he was going when he appeared to start with questioning in modern-day terms the qualities of the Twelve – we’ve all heard liberals with nothing to say preaching at Ordinations do the ‘what would a firm of management consultants think of the Apostles’ party piece. But it was all redeemed by his suggestion that it would only be Judas who would have had the qualities to get ahead in the modern day terms that seem to be understood by so much of the CofE. But it was a homily about priesthood; the apparent unworthiness of the priest belied by God’s grace equipping the priest for the work he does and the example he sets.

 

This morning to St Stephen’s House (‘Staggers’) for the funeral Mass of Fr Alan Bean SSJE, attended by around 35 friends, clergy and fellow religious. Fr Bean was 95 years old. He was Ordained in the 1930s, a military chaplain in WWII and a member of SSJE – the Cowley Fathers – since just after it, and had what was described as a quiet ministry, in the UK and in India. Quiet his ministry may have been; holy he certainly was.

Both Bishop Andrew’s anniversary – he Ordained me as deacon and priest, and St Barnabas is where I worshipped for a few years, was married and had our eldest Baptised – and Fr Bean’s funeral – he was at Alleyn’s School with my late father and was a significant presence at Staggers during my time there – had personal significance for me, but were both, more importantly, celebrations of a model and type of priesthood for which the CofE of today has little or no time or understanding, and says so much about itself in that ignorance.

Too bad for the CofE.

Crucifixes to be put up in prison cells to enable Christian prisoners to pray

No, of course not; don’t be daft.

But, compass points showing the correct direction to Mecca are to be inscribed on the ceilings of prison cells to enable Muslim prisoners to pray, following a trial at Bethel Street Police Station in Norwich. Furthermore, prisoners who request one will be given a compass (a risk assessment will of course be carried out before any compass is issued – so that’s all right then.)

So why shouldn’t Crucifixes be put up too (or at least be available), for the sake of Christian prisoners? Because, of course, dear reader, the Crucifix might ‘offend’ someone – and would it get past the risk assessment, given the precedent that an angel once enabled St Peter to walk miraculously free from prison?

What, however, if a Christian were to be offended by having the direction of Mecca imposed on him as he lies on the bunk staring at the ceiling. Too bad, I suspect. That would probably be described as intolerance, and so not to be taken account of.

‘The Son of Man must be lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so that everyone who believes might have eternal life in him.’

Pope Benedict’s Prayer Intentions for July 2009

Christians in the Middle East - that Christians in the Middle East may live their faith in complete freedom and become instruments of reconciliation and peace.

Humanity Reconciled - through the witness of the faithful, may the Church be the seed and soil of a humanity reconciled to be God's one true family on earth.

Erastian hogwash at Westminster Abbey

The Daily Telegraph reports that plans are afoot to replace the plain and flattish pyramid that presently sits above the crossing of Westminster Abbey with a corona, a crown-shaped structure that will change the roofline of the Abbey and, to some people’s apparent upset, the skyline of London.

I can’t say that changing the roofline of the Abbey or the skyline of London of themselves bother me overmuch; the latter is constantly changing and the present Abbey hasn’t exactly remained unchanged during the course of its life, so why set it in aspic now?

But what does bother me is that the structure to be added is a corona – a crown – and the hope is that it will be completed ‘in time to mark the 60th anniversary of the Queen's Coronation at the Abbey in 2013, with the large crown a symbol of the royal milestone.’

A large crown sat atop a major church to mark the 60th Anniversary of the coronation of the monarch … a statement in stone that the CofE is (as it is regarded impolite to acknowledge) but a department of the British State - in the words of Cardinal Walter Kasper when he last addressed the CofE House of Bishops, a protestant community of the 16th Century rather than part of the Church of the 1st Century.

Why not go all multi-faith, as the CofE is resolutely doing anyway – make it a dome with a crescent on top and include a minaret? The ‘defender of faiths’ in waiting would be tickled pink!

The Year of the Priest and the bones of St Paul

I’ve added the logo for the Year for Priests / Year of the Priest (there seems to be a degree of variation in how it is being described) to the right-hand column of the blog, above that for last year’s Year of St Paul, which I was going to remove, but have decided not to. The positive effect of the Year of St Paul did not lapse with the passing of June 29th.

I thought quite hard about adding the logo for the Year of the Priest – it is undoubtedly a good thing and I hope that it is not only Roman Catholic priests that are inspired by it to some extent – not least that Roman Catholic laity are inspired to prayer for their priests.

However, I am not a Roman Catholic priest and falling with glad cries on this Year of the Priest on the part of those such as me seems, at least in part, to be ducking the issue of the lack of communion between us and the Catholic Church, and the fact that there is rightly or wrongly at least a large question-mark over Anglican Orders in the mind of the greater part of Christendom - and that the behaviour of Anglicanism towards the Orders it claims to share with the Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches provides no motivation to the rest of Christendom to reconsider its position.

As the Year of St Paul ends, we are told with great certainty that fragments of the bones of St Paul have been discovered in Rome, at the Church of St Paul Outside the Walls. From the contents of the sarcophagus, it was clear that the bones belonged to someone who had been buried with honour sometime in the first or second century – the slab that covered the sarcophagus bears the inscription ‘Paul, apostle and martyr’. QED. Nearby, on the wall of a catacomb was recently discovered what is believed to be the oldest extant image of St Paul (pictured).

When I get to Rome, one day, wherever else I go, the mortal remains of St Peter and St Paul, the pillars of the Church, will be crucial to my pilgrimage.

St Paul the Priest & the Curé d’Ars

This evening I went – albeit late, thanks to someone having been knocked off his motorbike on the North Circular – to the First Mass of Fr Simon Morris, Assistant Curate at St Mary, Lansdowne Road, Tottenham.

The preacher was Fr Robin Ward SSC, Principal of St Stephen’s House, Oxford. He preached eloquently, linking the Year of St Paul just passed and the Year of the Priest just beginning – St Paul being a priest of the New Covenant and the Year of the Priest being inevitably focussed on St John Vianney, Curé d’Ars, patron saint of parish priests. With any luck, his homily may be posted on the St Stephen’s House blog.

Fr Simon begins his ministry as a priest in the Church of England at a difficult and uncertain time, and we should pray for him and his contemporaries.

Amongst other things, Fr Robin’s homily made me reflect on how I have misjudged what the Anglican response to the Year of the Priest might be. The Year of St Paul got a decidedly lukewarm Anglican reception, and I had imagined that the Year of the Priest would get the same.

But no … . Anglo-Catholics / Affirming Catholics / and others have fallen with glad cries on the Year of the Priest in a way that makes the deafening silence of the response to the Year of St Paul even more stark.

Not keen on St Paul, very keen on the Curé d’Ars? Bit like coming to the Easter Vigil having ducked Good Friday …

Homily for the Feast of St Peter & St Paul 2009

+ In the name of the Father …

Today’s readings are one of those sets of readings on which it is almost too easy to find a theme on which to preach.

On this the closing Sunday of the Year of St Paul, I could focus on today’s second reading - Paul’s declaration that he has fought the good fight and run the race to the finish – and the encouragement it offers in our living of a Christian life.

Or I could focus on Peter’s miraculous liberation from prison – reflecting that as Scripture tells us elsewhere ‘nothing is impossible to God’; or Peter’s divinely inspired declaration of Jesus as ‘the Christ … the Son of the Living God’; or Peter as the Rock on which the Church is founded and what that tells us about how we should regard Pope Benedict as the successor in our day of Peter the Rock; or the authority of the Church to bind and loose as the basis of Sacramental Confession to a priest … an embarrassment of riches if you are looking for a preaching theme …

And so when I began earlier this week to reflect on what I was going to say this morning, I knew that I and others here have probably followed all or most of those themes in one way or another in previous homilies and wanted to find another route into these readings.

And the key was presented to me in the Gospel reading for Mass on Thursday, in which Jesus tells his disciples that those who listens to his words and obeys them is like a wise man who builds his house on a rock, and those who do not do so are like a foolish man who builds his house on sand.

I found two phrases, one from today’s Gospel and one from Thursday’s Gospel, sitting next to each other in my mind.

‘You are Peter, and on this Rock I build my Church’ … and … ‘everyone who listens to my word and acts on it will be like a sensible man who built his house on rock.’

Peter, the Rock, that is the foundation of the Church, on the one hand; the words of Christ, the rock-like foundation of a Christian life on the other.

Yes, we are certainly familiar with reading today’s Gospel ‘ecclesiologically’ – talking about the structure of the Church, the successor to St Peter at its centre, and the authority to forgive sin.

The link with Thursday’s Gospel invites us to think of how the Rock on which the Church is founded – Peter and his successors ­– is necessarily linked to the proper understanding of the rock of Christ’s Word – His Commandments, and how it and they can protect us from the storms and the floods, the winds and the rain of life in the world.

God has gifted each of us with the power of reason – we can think. We observe; we match what we see to previous patterns of cause and effect; we experience; we view and participate in the experiences of others.

We know what brings pleasure, and we know what hurts. We know what seems to be right, and we react against what seems to be wrong.

And carrying the baggage of all that observation and experience we come to what we are taught by the Church.

And sometimes – oftentimes even – it doesn’t all seem to match up. We are taught one thing, but we have come by reason and experience to believe another. What are we to do?

What we should do is to discern where the products of our reason – our opinions – sit in relation to what is set before us by that which is bigger than us, older than us and both beyond and around us ­– the Church.

The Church presents to us a deposit of Faith, something that has grown over the last 2,000 years. It is called the Tradition.

‘Tradition’ has acquired a negative sense in modern secular society. It represents what is old, what is passé, what is ‘so yesterday’. To be a traditionalist is to be a stick-in-the-mud. But that is a parody of the word.

Tradition – especially in the context of the Church – has a particular and far more positive, far more significant meaning.

In Latin, traditio means not ‘old hat’ but ‘to pass on’. The Tradition of the Faith is what has been handed to us and what we are entrusted with handing on to those who come after us.

We apply it to what is new – and offer to the Tradition what we believe we have learnt, but we cannot change it – we cannot add in what is foreign, nor cut out that which is inconvenient. That which we offer to the Tradition might well be rejected – and we may not be best placed either to judge or to immediately understand why.

What we receive today is that which has been handed down by successive generations, and if we trace it back will lead us to the two great pillars of the Church that we celebrate today – St Peter and St Paul; the rock on which the Church is founded, and the Apostle to the Gentiles whose life and mission became the embodiment of ‘go out and make disciples of all the nations’.

But, the liberal scoffers will say, what the Church teaches today isn’t what St Peter and St Paul handed on ­– they said nothing about abortion, nuclear weapons, fascism, liberalism, the ordination of women &c &c ­– all that’s just been added on; we can rewrite it if we like; make it fit better with modern life.

And what we should say against that is quite simply that the Church receives in each generation that which was received from the Apostles – built upon organically by prayer and study - in order to keep presenting the Gospel to each generation and allowing those who turn to Christ to live the Christian life.

No generation of the Church can ditch what has been handed to it; no generation can do what is at odds with what has been handed to it; each generation must allow the Tradition to grow always consistent to itself.

And by that process of prayer, study and discernment on the part of the Church, what is presented to us is not a library, but a rock built on and in Scripture, constant and consistent always to itself.

And if we build the house of our Christian lives on that rock of the teaching of the Church, we will withstand the storms, winds and rain of life in the world – our house will stand.

The Church and the teaching of the Church together provide our rock.

But what is the alternative?

The alternative would be to work it out for ourselves. Start from scratch. Start from what we think to be true from our personal experience. But how far can that take us – surely no further than the boundaries of a single life - the span and experience of a single life over against the overlapping spans of many lives, lived over 2,000 years and across many circumstances and cultures in the Church with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

From which I would suggest we cannot construct a rock on which to build the house of our Christian life from the experience of one life; a single life can only be one little grain of sand.

A little grain of sand that rubs up against the other grains of sand on the beach, and moves about as the waves push it to and fro.

The grain of sand of my life may look a whole lot like the grain of sand of your life, but they are never – will never be – identical. They cannot together form a rock, because they are too small.

And by the time we have acquired enough other grains of sand to apparently form the foundation of a house, we have so many differences that what we have isn’t a rock-like foundation, but a bed of sand.

Not something, as today’s Gospel warns, upon which to build the house of your Christian life.

And a problem that we here need to acknowledge is this ­– as Anglicans there is nothing official – at least in the Anglican sphere – to go back to and make sure that we are keeping within bounds. Anglicans are wont to respect reason and experience at least as much, if not more, than Scripture and Tradition.

What about the Bible, you say? Yes, the Bible is authoritative, but it needs to be interpreted and applied on questions of medical research and nuclear weapons and the rest.

If I try to work that out by myself and act on it – on the basis of my reason, my ability to think – I am relying on personal opinion alone.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church – and I make no bones about the fact that it is to the Catechism of the Catholic Church that I turn when I need to square what I know is going round my head with Christian teaching.

Sometimes, in prayer and reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church I find that the conclusions to which I might have liked to be able to come are not constant with what I find in the Catechism.

And I have then to ask myself the question: ‘which is greater – the grain of sand of my personal opinion and reason, or the rock that is the teaching of the Church – the guarantee that the interpretation of Scripture by which I live is not simply that which feels right to me – but that which the Church over 2,000 years has discerned to be true.

An example might be the priest I overheard recently at a clergy meeting who, discussing with another priest what he was going to preach on today, said: ‘Oh, I don’t like to preach on St Paul, and I certainly don’t like quoting him – he’s usually wrong.’

There in a stroke one Anglican priest took to himself authority to dismiss the teaching of St Paul, one of the two pillars of the church – the subject or author of about half the New Testament - on the grounds that he doesn’t personally approve of the content of St Paul’s teaching, nothing more.

The answer that I believe that I must give myself if I were in such a position is, as the book of Proverbs tells us, that I must lean on the Lord in the teaching of the Church He founded on Peter, and not on my own understanding.

When Christ appointed Peter as first among the Apostles, and when he revealed Himself to Paul on the road to Damascus, He was establishing not a community of opinion and endless debate, but a community of revealed Truth.

From time to time, that Truth may challenge us and throw us off beam, making us question ourselves to our deepest core.

To which our reaction must be not a resentful insistence that my reason, my opinion trumps the teaching of the Church because it feels better, but an acknowledgement in all humility that the Church founded on Peter is right and we may be wrong, or at the very least imperfect in understanding.

Today, on this feast of St Peter, the Rock, and St Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, let us pray for humility, that we will allow the court of our private opinion to bow to that higher court – the Catholic Faith as the Church receives it from the Apostles and the Saints - in the glory of its Truth, revealed by God, and discerned by the Church under the guidance of the Most Holy Spirit.

+ AMEN.