Good Lord, Deliver Us

Ah, the Litany. Peter Hitchens recently blogged about the almost complete abandonment of the once normal practice of reciting it in Church of England parish churches on Ash Wednesday, often with civic dignitaries, as such, in attendance. That was standard stuff well into living memory.

The Litany's history is an important monument to that of England between the Breach with Rome and the Restoration, initially invoking all three of Our Lady, the Angels and the Saints to "pray for us", while at the same time entreating, "From the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities, Good Lord, deliver us." 130 or so somewhat rambunctious years later, both of those testaments to the conflicted personality of Henry VIII and his Realm had disappeared.

Like the splendidly uncompromising summary of Christian marriage given in the Order for the Solemnization of Matrimony (not the 1928 revision used at the recent Royal Wedding, which squeamishly omits the description of marriage as "a remedy against fornication"), the Litany is one of the glories of the Book of Common Prayer as not used by the people who have joined or might join the Ordinariate, denouncing sin and evil in no uncertain terms.

Today's news could not illustrate more starkly the reality of sin and evil, and the need to follow Jesus in casting out demons. The attempt to portray any such belief and practice as somehow exotically African is part of a concerted attempt to present Christianity as a "black thing" in the way that Islam is "a brown thing", and in this country just as much a product of post-War immigration.

In point of fact, the common Catholic or Anglican baptism of an infant includes exorcism, every Catholic diocese has an exorcist, I know for a fact that every C of E one does, I fully expect that so does every Irish or Welsh equivalent, and even now I should not be surprised if Scottish Episcopalians made similar provision. No form of religion with its roots in the Scottish Reformation, or the Puritan movements, or the phenomena that variously accrued to or arose out of the work of the Wesleys, could possibly be without such features, either. Indeed, no form of religion that looked with any seriousness to the ministry of Jesus could be.

The whole Church was baptised with the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, and She manifests that baptism through a rich plurality of gifts, the charisms. The whole Church, and thus every member, is therefore both Pentecostal and Charismatic. Every gift is a charism, and each is always given for the good of the whole body, in response to Her evangelistic activity, in the context of Her sacramental life, and subject to Her gift of discernment. She exercises that gift within Her institutional life, because the institutional Church and the charismatic Church are inseparable; they are two aspects of a single reality. It is wholly unscriptural to impose any requirement that anyone exercise any particular charism in order to be considered a full, believing member of the Church.

There has never been the slightest doubt that the charisms include healing, exorcism, prophecy and words of knowledge, nor really even that they include speaking in tongues. Furthermore, healing is here understood as even those of us not raised in the Charismatic Movement understand it: it is the restoration of the human person to wholeness, which may or may not take the form of healing as understood by medical science, depending on what is known best to the Holy Spirit, Who is the Wisdom of God.

Similarly, the performance of exorcism is restricted to suitably qualified persons, and it is only ever used against the power of that objective evil which we can but thank God that we do not fully understand. Prophecy is recognised as the gift of being able to read the signs of the times and to communicate effectively what is thus read, so that it does always include the prediction of the future: foretelling is always integral to forth-telling. Words of knowledge are always relevant, always wise counsel and always independently verifiable. Speaking in tongues is never without the interpretation of tongues, and together they make it possible to understand where this would not otherwise be the case.

For example, as well as having been miraculously healed, the great Dominican Saint Vincent Ferrer was also blessed with the gift of tongues. Other than Ecclesiastical Latin and despite his English father, he had no language but Limousin, which was what they spoke in his native Valencia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet he was a tireless itinerant missionary, preaching to tremendous effect in Aragon, Castile, Switzerland, France, Italy, England, Ireland and Scotland.

Whereas glossolalia is a twentieth-century running together of two Biblical Greek words in order to describe a twentieth-century phenomenon which does not occur in the Bible. Is it Saint Paul's "tongues of angels"? There is nothing in Scripture to support that view. The true gift of tongues is as manifested by Saint Vincent Ferrer OP, Biblical scholar, philosopher, thus doubly informed and doubly informing theologian, and thanks to that ongoing formation a gloriously successful preacher of the Gospel, not least to the Jews, precisely as an ordained priest and a solemnly professed Religious in perfect unity with the See of Peter.

Healing, exorcism, prophecy, words of knowledge, speaking in tongues, and the other charisms serve to re-root theology in experience and to call the whole Church to watch at all times for the Second Coming. They restore the integrity of the Liturgy by freeing it from over-formality and over-conventionality. And they release the ministries of women, young people, the poor, and others who experience marginalisation and oppression.

Yet there is never any question of any one gift being used to decide whether or not someone has been "baptised with the Holy Spirit", because it is the whole Church that has been so baptised. Nor need there be any degeneration into banal and incoherent services. And nor is there any transfer of ecclesial authority to parachurch leaders, because there is no parachurch.

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