Saturday, 23 November 2013

Cardinal Agnes

Make it so, Holy Father.

Make it so.
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17 comments:

  1. Anonymous23 November 2013 at 21:13

    She's not perfect-read about that incident with some journalists who died rather mysteriously, and one begins to wonder if there's a little truth to what is said about her.

    Being anti-war doesn't just mean indiscriminately embracing everyone else who is anti-war.

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  2. David Lindsay23 November 2013 at 23:01

    She is better than the alternative.

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  3. Anonymous23 November 2013 at 23:19

    Yes-but I'd like to know just how close to Assad she is, or if she does speak purely out of concern for Syrian Christians and for peace, as she says.

    Some impartial investigating needs to be done.

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  4. David Lindsay23 November 2013 at 23:25

    "Close to Assad"? I doubt that very much. But, as you say, it is worth investigating.

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  5. Anonymous24 November 2013 at 16:46

    Ed West is excellent on the Anglican Church which is dying because-as he rightly says-it's become a soulless Leftist creed and abandoned its conservatism.

    Ed West writes; ""My diagnosis of the Church of England is that it is too lefty.Whenever I attend and irrespective of the parish I go to, it’s a bit like being read the Guardian comment page.""

    ""Of course, much leftist thought stems from Christianity, but what you hear in Anglican (and Catholic) churches sounds less like authentic Christianity and more like a minority faith trying to ape the style of the dominant creed in society. But what’s the point? The whole statist worldview is fantastically implausible enough without adding supernatural elements to it. Surely, this overtly political talk must put off more people than it attracts?""

    Brilliant.

    Hard to believe that, as Peter Hitchens recalls in Abolition of Britain, the Church of England was once tougher than the Catholic Church on divorce and the Book of Common Prayer was its main staple.

    It's now a feeble liberal leftist body that even half supports gay marriage...and joins the Labour Party in propaganda on welfare.

    No wonder Peter Hitchens and Ed West are reactionary-it's enough to make anyone long for the good old days.

    Hitchens is the only one who can remember when things were better.

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  6. David Lindsay24 November 2013 at 23:17

    A stopped clock from before you were born.

    As for the BCP, all that it did was ensure that no one ever asked what anyone actually believed, because only a full-blown Early Modern Calvinist could possibly have believed its words, but that didn't matter as long as you appreciated the rhythm of the prose: style over substance.

    And of course the C of E was never tougher on divorce than the Catholic Church was. Nor does Peter ever allege so ridiculous a thing.

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  7. Anonymous25 November 2013 at 21:07

    I understand that you have no clue what you are talking about, because you don't know anyone who was alive when the C Of E was anything other than a liberal leftist body.

    You don't remember the better days-but here's a historical reminder.

    In 1951, in response to Eirene White’s Divorce Bill, (which foreshadowed the eventual Act of 1969 by suggesting automatic dissolution after a period of separation) the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher , said ‘It is of the first importance for the nation that this divine law [of marriage] should be upheld."

    "" Nothing but lifelong monogamous marriage can adequately establish home life; provide for the birth and nurture of training of a family of children over a period of years""

    In its document of that time, ‘The Church and Marriage’, the C of E responded to critics who said its attitude would cause hardship to many thus : ""Whoever succeeded in raising the moral tone of any society without causing the frustration of some natural desires, and the hardship of having to forego them?’""

    That was the old, seriously conservative Tory C Of E.

    Those were the days when a seriously conservative Tory Party opposed even the decriminalisation of homosexuality-and the abolition of hanging.

    Now the C Of E (and the Tories) have become a wet, liberal leftist joke.

    The modern C Of E (so far removed from its right-wing anti-divorce past) couldn't even convincingly oppose gay marriage.

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  8. David Lindsay25 November 2013 at 21:11

    Well looked-up, although I did already know all of that.

    Let us just say that that is rather a partial account of the Church of England's approach even to purely sexual matters, never mind to any others, in the 1950s. As you would know, if you knew anything.

    And my original point still stands.

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  9. Anonymous25 November 2013 at 22:11

    It is not remotely "partial".

    The C of E was once ferociously conservative (when it was still Tory) and has ceased to be, at roughly the same time the Tories ceased to be.

    And, let me guess, you believe the popular Catholic fantasy that the C Of E came about because "Horny Henry" was gagging for a divorce, right?

    Which is of course laughably far from the truth, that the C Of E was essential to our national independence (of course, the Catholic Church then frequently granted annulments to European Kings, and only denied Henry because of Spanish political interference).

    Henry's perfectly rational fear was, of course, that Catherine couldn't give him a male heir.

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  10. David Lindsay25 November 2013 at 23:27

    Two periods, one of them really very recent, and you are hopelessly wrong about both of them.

    Still, you'll learn. If you can be bothered.

    The C of E was a bastion of orthodoxy in the Fifties? I ask you!

    The aggregate of the Church's members within a given political entity (although it was not even all of those members in England) cannot legitimately secede from unity with Rome, even under more salubrious circumstances. That is simply not within their rights.

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  11. Anonymous26 November 2013 at 00:00

    When male homosexual activity was decriminalised between consenting adults in private in 1967 the Church of England's Moral Welfare Council had been advocating that change for nearly 20 years

    That was far longer than any other major institution and since long before it became anything like mainstream public opinion. That was what made it mainstream public opinion, the long running support of the Church of England.

    Not very liberal by today's standards. Who would disagree with it now? But extremely so in the 1950s when it first became the Church of England's official definition of Moral Welfare.

    Similar things apply to the laws on divorce and abortion, neither would have happened without the Established Church's active support.

    On both it were far ahead of society at large, if that is the right way of putting it.

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  12. David Lindsay26 November 2013 at 00:26

    Quite so.

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  13. Anonymous26 November 2013 at 17:29

    Anonymous is right on decriminalisation of homosexuality (what could be more un-British than criminalising a private sexual act between consenting adults?) but totally, demonstrably wrong on divorce, opposed by the Anglican Church in the strongest terms, back in the 50's-just as the Tories opposed that, and easy abortion when Labour introduced them.

    Divorce doubled just two years after Labour's introduction of easy, no-fault divorce and continued rising throughout the 70's.

    Just as 200,000 abortions a year is Labour's legacy-even David Steele now regrets the abuse of that Act.

    An abuse all it's opponents foresaw when that radical Labour Government introduced it.

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  14. Anonymous26 November 2013 at 17:37

    And, yes it was very conservative on social issues-as Cardinal Fisher's letter and the document "The Church and Marriage" makes abundantly clear.

    Read it, if you still doubt it.

    As for Henry's annulment ( he never sought a divorce) all serious historians know the Church's decision to deny it was a purely political interference in our internal affairs-at the behest of Spain.

    Read the history of Spain's lobbying of the Vatican over the period.

    The same Vatican that once offered Spain a fortune if its Armada could land in Britain.

    Breaking from the Catholic Church was essential to national independence.

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  15. David Lindsay26 November 2013 at 20:46

    Cardinal Fisher? There once really was one, and I suggest that you look him up.

    On the rest, you are all over the place.

    The C of E was the first church, ever, to teach that there was no inherent link between sexual activity and procreation.

    No fault divorce was introduced by John Major, and the 1967 Abortion Act was not a Government Bill. Whereas Thatcher's legalisation of abortion up to birth was.

    I could go on, but what would be the point?

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  16. Anonymous27 November 2013 at 18:47

    No- fault divorce was introduced by Labour in 1969. It abolished the need to prove "cruelty or infidelity". Divorce rates doubled immediately after. Marriage has been dying ever since.

    If you think mass, easy divorce began under John Major, you should give up blogging. Or just read the divorce statistics.

    I meant Archbishop Fisher, of course. As you know. And you couldn't answer the point- that the C of E was demonstrably fiercely anti-divorce in the 50's, back when it was a Tory body.

    Easy abortion was a Government Bill in all but name-which is why it had the support of the Labour Government, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and got lots of Parliamentary time.

    Without which it couldn't have passed.

    The same government that brought us mass divorce and mass abortion also abolished Direct Grant schools, and beat policing and the death penalty, expanded teacher training, relaxed censorship, decriminalised cannabis and introduced Circular 10/65 to abolish grammar schools.

    Was it all by accident or by design?

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  17. David Lindsay28 November 2013 at 00:09

    Time for your lie down.

    The Church of England practically wrote the 1969 Divorce Reform Act, and had practically written it a decade or more before, long before most people would have agreed with it, although not as long as the shift in opinion would have suggested. You are just wrong about no-fault, by the way. That was Major. I remember it.

    And the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Methodist Church practically wrote the 1967 Abortion Act, again well before, in those fast-moving times, public opinion had come to anything like the same view. Steel himself has said many times that he just turned their three respective reports on the subject into a Bill and introduced it. But it took Thatcher to use a Government Bill to legalise abortion up to birth.

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