Our Times by A. N. Wilson

Author:A. N. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2008-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

16

The Decline of the Roman Catholic Church

The dissolution of the Church of England during our times was an inevitability. That Church had originated in a time when its Erastian claims had known only one serious challenger, the Church of Rome, which had been seen off by the Penal Laws, which existed until 1829. While it tolerated the existence of Protestant sects, the central reason for the Church of England’s existence was that any other religious body in England was superfluous. To be English was to be a member of the Church of England, unless one opted out. Hence the fact that nearly all primary schools were, throughout our times, Church schools. They were different in status from ‘faith schools’, run by Jews, Muslims or Catholics. Though–because–attached to the Church of England, they were also, ipso facto, state schools. The Church was part of the state. The Church of England was the religion of the monarch, and of the two older universities. It had periodic moments of spiritual revival, sometimes ‘high’, sometimes ‘low’ church, but its life had been bound up with the organism of the post-1660 nation state. That state was now unravelling. The aristocracy still existed, but they were no longer the ‘governing class’. There was all but no squirarchy left, so that in those parishes where the living still had a patron–often the lord of the manor, who had been associated with the same area of England since the Norman Conquest–it seemed to many anomalous that a landowner, rather than a bishop, together with the church wardens, should choose the parson. The very word ‘parson’, familiar term for the parish priest since Chaucer, went out of use. Few quite realised it in the 1960s, but the last generation of literate parsons had been ordained. Those clerical families, such as had given birth to Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, John Cowper Powys, etc, were a thing of the past. The large, draughty rectories–one in every parish, rural or urban–were also a vanished thing, as the Church began a policy of selling off its parsonage-houses, and rehousing the clergy in small, modern dwellings, which reflected the character and class of the new ordinands: no room for books, no room for eight children, all dressed in hand-me-downs; in short, they were no longer gentlemen’s houses, and those gentlemen who would in a previous generation have taken orders were now drawn to other ways of life.

The organic unity of the Church of England, then, was threatened even before it had an Archbishop of Canterbury–Michael Ramsey–who candidly hated it, and who, by giving it its own parliament, the Synod, and cutting it loose from the Parliament, had sawn off one of its vital limbs. Hitherto, as has been stated already, there was a new sect, ‘Anglicanism’, which attracted fewer and fewer adherents.

Those who believed in Christianity as some ecstatic personal experience were drawn more and more to the Billy Graham religion, which had first been manifest in Britain in 1954, and which grew

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.