Wednesday 14 May 2014

"What Is It Like To Be White In A Black Church?"

Thus did Desmond Tutu begin his speech to an Anglican conference in England decades ago. He was stunned when his audience laughed. He had been entirely serious.

With Nigeria in the news, remember that the aftermath, first of the Church of England's unexpected vote in favour of women presbyters in 1992, and then of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, has created a situation in which, in the Church of England's severely straightened financial circumstances since the 1990s, its richest sections now look for leadership to Anglican archbishops on either side of Africa's widest point, above all in Nigeria (which has the largest Anglican church in the world), but with Uganda in a fairly close second place.

Those in turn are to an extent intellectually, and to a great extent financially, dependent on non-Anglican non-archbishops in the United States.

There are those who would contend, both for the traditional definition of marriage, and for the status of the Church of England as a bulwark of national independence.

But that body only holds that line because it is effectively subject to a double foreign control, directly from an Africa that is far less like England than Rome was in the sixteenth century or is today, and indirectly from an American Bible Belt which is scarcely, if at all, more like England than Africa is.

This extends, as Dr Jeffrey John has been only the most public to have discovered, to the appointment of bishops in the Church of England, and thus to filling of certain seats in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

The election of Anglican bishops in Africa is frequently bound up with party and tribal politics, while the political dimension of American Evangelicalism and fundamentalism requires no explanation.

Without that foreign control, the Church of England would not merely have supported, but would have written, the same-sex marriage legislation, as it spent decades before the decriminalisation of male homosexuality lobbying for proposals that were in fact more extensive than those which Roy Jenkins eventfully put onto the Statute Book.

The Church of England also spent those decades lobbying for what, with its enthusiastic parliamentary support, became the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, and indeed for something far more liberal, which John Major finally gave it much later.

And David Steel openly describes how he did little or nothing more than write up as the 1967 Abortion Act the suspiciously similar reports on the subject by the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Methodist Church.

Again, Michael Ramsey, who for some bizarre reason is widely regarded as a kind of Anglo-Catholic saint, used what was then still the considerable authority of his office in that legislation's favour.

The Catholic bishops really do believe that only a man and a woman can contract a marriage.

But even if they did not, the Pope does, and would be ipso facto deposed for heresy, ceasing to be Pope, and thus necessitating a new conclave, if he ever ceased to do so.

That the Catholic bishops are required to agree with him at least outwardly, and that he could do something about it if they did not, is why they are not in Parliament.

Most of the Anglican bishops also believe that only a man and a woman can contract a marriage.

But they are the Anglican bishops, whereas men of the same views as not a few of them would have stood no chance of such office 20, or 40, or 60 years ago, precisely because only candidates who held such an opinion could now be appointed, on the insistence of Africa and of Africa's (non-Anglican) American backers.

Yet some of those candidates do thus acquire seats in Parliament.

That acquisition is now effectively conditional on their having conspired to contrive a situation in which, on foreign insistence, it is now possible to be legally married in England without being married in the eyes of the Church of England.

Anyone who would not have participated in that international contrivance could not have been considered for appointment to those parliamentary seats.

Saint John Fisher, pray for us.

No comments:

Post a Comment