A few days ago, I heard some delightfully old-fashioned language on the Home Service. A gentleman describing himself as "the Bishop of Leicester" was talking about Unity!!! Just as people like him used to back in the 1960s!! It was all there: the importance of Unity for Mission; the Prayer of the Lord for Unity (Anglican bishops get quite fundamentalist about the Gospels containing the Lord's ipsissima verba when it suits them ... less so when it doesn't) ...
"Gracious!" I thought, putting down my piece of toast laden with melitzanosalata from that nice Greek Deli up Walton Street (it was a little after 8.30 and I was tucking into brekker after my 7.45 EF Mass). "The buggers have changed their minds! They want Unity after all! They're going to call Walter Kasper back and tell him, in floods of tears, that, despite everything, they long for his kisses and are heeding his call not to go further down the path of wilful and heretical divergence!"
Er ... No. "Leicester" was in conversation with a Methodist gentleman, and his rhetoric was just part of the longstanding campaign - really, when you think about it, rather like the activity of Somali pirates - of the Anglican Establishment to kidnap the Methodists' buoyant and smartly painted property portfolio and Pension Fund before HMS Ecclesia Anglicana sinks finally beneath its burdens of debt and bureaucratic overspending. (Someone should warn the Methodists that Anglican bishops may sound like gentle and respectful wooers, but it's important for a girl to watch where they put their hands.)
How could I have been so naive?
They should beware of the trifle as well. I can just hear the bishop whispering "have some Madeira, m'dear", oh so enticingly.
ReplyDeleteOh Methy dear, why not stick with that nice boy Yurk or whatever his name is? He may be undersized and dull, but he'd be so much more dependable, so much more your sort than some old roué in a purple cassock.
"Brekker" - interesting; here Down Under we say "brekkie".
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ReplyDeleteVery sad and humorous at the same time. Off topic - sot of - when you ACs use the OF/EF do you follow completely the RC practice of distribution in only 1 kind? Been wanting to ask for the longest time.
We over here in the USA can't figure out why the U.K. Anglo-Catholics swallowed the Novus Ordo hook, line, and sinker. We though you had better taste than that!
Not that it matter to me, I am Eastern Orthodox but we do find it curious. Even our Western Rites distribute in both kinds. Please, some enlightenment.
The Church of Scotland - so much closer in ethos and polity - seems uninteresting to Methodists and vice versa
ReplyDeleteThis is an asset grab by a Church of England understandably in panic in her collapse but without any reference to what is, or was, her defining ethos, polity or principle.
Anglicans in Scotland seem less interested in union with the National Church for in the Northern Kingdom they would be the Methodists; in that case broke Methodists.
Matthew (Novus Ordo): an interesting question, that I have often asked, and to which I have never had a satisfactory answer. A massive amount of Patrimony was voluntarily thrown away, and to please whom? There was a general loss of nerve running through all British institutions in the 60s and 70s; they were embarrassed by their own past and by any sign of tradition. Perhaps that is part of the explanation.
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