Heaven's above!
Christ, of course, preached love for one’s fellow man. Ever since, paedophiles (or as they are sometimes known, Catholic priests) and homosexualists (their Anglican brothers) have been using the fact that the apostles were all blokes in order to stop women entering the priesthood.
Priests love shouting the odds about stopping women becoming priests or bishops or cardinals or popes or whatever because as long as the focus is on stopping women being priests, nobody’s talking about stopping bummers becoming priests.
Priests, one suspects, think that the role of women in the church is to dust, make tea and arrange flowers, rather than become a bishop and then banishing them from their comfortable twee country parish to some challenging inner city hell hole where they think that pastoral care is something that’s done with dairy products. The sort of modernising that today’s clergy would agree with is replacing the collection plate with a chip and pin machine, or better still direct debit because you wouldn’t even need to attend church to contribute. Easy payment tieth scheme; a tenner a week or damnation.
The Anglican church seems to be in a bit of a state about consecrating women as bishops (and yankee bummers in any capacity whatever). Not quite sure why, surely a bishop is just a priest but a bit more senior? So it seems like women will have a bit of trouble breaking the stained glass ceiling. Lots of the dissenting parishes appear to be African, where they take their religion rather seriously. That being the case, one has to ask, have they got the right church?
The Church of England (the head of which is, of course, a woman) is the default option for those who can’t be arsed to think enough about faith to decide whether they have any or not, those of us who go to church, well, never, but are quite happy to pray in moments of crisis. I, for instance, have made numerous deals with God, promising to be a better person if he graciously allows me to live through the hangover prompting my road to Demascus moment. I’m looking at the spire of my village church now and it gives me tremendous comfort to know that it is there. I never go, but it looks jolly pretty and the bells are appealing.
Much, much better a spire than a minaret. I’m always somewhat nervous of allowing priests to build what are essentially look-out posts. The last thing one would want would be to be explaining to one’s priest that you could not make last week’s service because you were ill, only to be confronted with a snapshot taken by a long-lensed camera of you relaxing in your back garden in the sunshine. The fact you are having your cock sucked by your neighbour’s daughter is mere detail, the sin is not turning up for church.
African Anglicans also seem to have something of a downer on ulists. This has always been something of a mystery to me although I suppose the concern in many of the poorer parts of the world that rely heavily on goat-herding for a living is that if the goat boys are frantically bumming each other behind a thicket, it’s easier for a lion to make off with the goats. How many farmers, one wonders, have pitched up for a surprise inspection only to see a couple of goatboys hastily pulling up their trousers while in the distance there’s a diminishing clanking of a goat bell as the lion buggers off with Billy.
The situation is such that there is speculation of schism. This would be very troubling, as it would mean that English churches would no longer be able to justify collections for their sister churches in Africa. On the plus side, it also means that hideous and poorly carved ‘thank you’ gifts from African villages for their nice new school would no longer require storage in the vicarage. Instead, the English churches would have to collect for the poorer parishes in the UK, where, for instance, the vicar only takes one foreign holiday each year, or where he has to iron his own vestments.
Priests love shouting the odds about stopping women becoming priests or bishops or cardinals or popes or whatever because as long as the focus is on stopping women being priests, nobody’s talking about stopping bummers becoming priests.
Priests, one suspects, think that the role of women in the church is to dust, make tea and arrange flowers, rather than become a bishop and then banishing them from their comfortable twee country parish to some challenging inner city hell hole where they think that pastoral care is something that’s done with dairy products. The sort of modernising that today’s clergy would agree with is replacing the collection plate with a chip and pin machine, or better still direct debit because you wouldn’t even need to attend church to contribute. Easy payment tieth scheme; a tenner a week or damnation.
The Anglican church seems to be in a bit of a state about consecrating women as bishops (and yankee bummers in any capacity whatever). Not quite sure why, surely a bishop is just a priest but a bit more senior? So it seems like women will have a bit of trouble breaking the stained glass ceiling. Lots of the dissenting parishes appear to be African, where they take their religion rather seriously. That being the case, one has to ask, have they got the right church?
The Church of England (the head of which is, of course, a woman) is the default option for those who can’t be arsed to think enough about faith to decide whether they have any or not, those of us who go to church, well, never, but are quite happy to pray in moments of crisis. I, for instance, have made numerous deals with God, promising to be a better person if he graciously allows me to live through the hangover prompting my road to Demascus moment. I’m looking at the spire of my village church now and it gives me tremendous comfort to know that it is there. I never go, but it looks jolly pretty and the bells are appealing.
Much, much better a spire than a minaret. I’m always somewhat nervous of allowing priests to build what are essentially look-out posts. The last thing one would want would be to be explaining to one’s priest that you could not make last week’s service because you were ill, only to be confronted with a snapshot taken by a long-lensed camera of you relaxing in your back garden in the sunshine. The fact you are having your cock sucked by your neighbour’s daughter is mere detail, the sin is not turning up for church.
African Anglicans also seem to have something of a downer on ulists. This has always been something of a mystery to me although I suppose the concern in many of the poorer parts of the world that rely heavily on goat-herding for a living is that if the goat boys are frantically bumming each other behind a thicket, it’s easier for a lion to make off with the goats. How many farmers, one wonders, have pitched up for a surprise inspection only to see a couple of goatboys hastily pulling up their trousers while in the distance there’s a diminishing clanking of a goat bell as the lion buggers off with Billy.
The situation is such that there is speculation of schism. This would be very troubling, as it would mean that English churches would no longer be able to justify collections for their sister churches in Africa. On the plus side, it also means that hideous and poorly carved ‘thank you’ gifts from African villages for their nice new school would no longer require storage in the vicarage. Instead, the English churches would have to collect for the poorer parishes in the UK, where, for instance, the vicar only takes one foreign holiday each year, or where he has to iron his own vestments.
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