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Wednesday 22 September 2010
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Conservative Anglicans should resist the temptation to convert to Roman Catholicism, says Peter Hitchens. It is the Church of England that is best placed to challenge our secularist age
What a pity it is that all the hate and slime now directed against the Pope’s visit is not aimed instead at the Church of England. Why do God-haters and militant secularists have to turn on a pensionable German theology professor and head of a Rome-based religious multinational organisation, when they want to condemn the steadfast defence of Christian morality?
For at least some Anglicans, the savaging of the Bishop of Rome will give rise to sinful pangs of envy. We would like Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman — and, I am rather compelled to mention, my brother Christopher — to be hurling their fiery darts at Thomas Cranmer’s church instead. But these professional scoffers unkindly refuse to scoff at our texts and formularies. They even put in a kind word for the beauty of Evensong, and the poetic majesty of the 1611 Bible and 1662 Prayer Book. In this they are mistaken, as we shall see, though not about the beauty or the majesty. More sensibly, they cannot find it in their hearts to loathe or rail at the exasperated, kindly, furry and baffled figure of Rowan, our Archbishop.
Even so, Dr Williams is not in fact the Church of England, and nor are its current prelates, who squabble and chatter beneath the giant arches of the great cathedrals. A mighty institution, armed with scripture, tradition and reason, and adorned with centuries of poetry, courage and devotion looms behind them. Why is it that a foreign church, whose leader (according to the confident 37th of the 39 articles) ‘hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England’, is the chosen target of the modish ‘new’ atheists? Why is it that, in recent years, it has been generally assumed that any conservative religious person in this country is a Roman Catholic, or about to become one?
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Beautifully said, Peter! Amen.
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