O PRAISE YE DELORS
Peter Hitchens on the interesting new
injunctions of the Church of England
MOST gentle Christian souls would proba- bly agree that the politburos and supreme soviets of Brussels and Strasbourg are much in need of divine help, and their euro-rouble even more so; but does the Church of Eng- land really need to pray for them? The lat- est Anglican services, now being introduced, are stark and unsettling as never before, but their most striking innovation is a prayer for the European Union. Worshippers are henceforth supposed to ask God to give `vision, understanding and integrity' to the members of European institutions. The same petition also nods to multiculturalism and devolution, describing the monarch as the 'symbol of loyalty and unity for all our different peoples' and speaking of 'the par- liaments in these islands'.
The appearance of Euro-prayers shows the extent of the cultural revolution in this most English of institutions. The Thirty- Nine Articles, the founding charter of the Church, are thoroughly conservative and Eurosceptic, insisting firmly that the King's Majesty 'is not, nor ought to be, subject to any foreign jurisdiction'. Anglicanism has always been a political faith and its Prayer Book is the most sonorous and uncompro- mising endorsement of the Elizabethan settlement — national independence under a Christian monarch subject to the law. It insists on the individual rather than the social conscience, and is solemn and earthy about sin and repentance, rather than happy or clappy. It even has special prayers for the Navy. It is as near as you can get to an English ideology in style and substance. Every word in it, especially the formal and respectful use of 'Thou' when God himself is addressed, supports uniquely English ideas of hierarchy, law and respect for the past. No wonder the reforming liberals hate it so.
The 20th century has taught us that lan- guage is one of the main weapons of mod- em power, whether it be the verbless, evasive drivel of Tony Blair or the barbarous jargons of Bolshevism and National Social- ism. Yet the battle to save the 1662 Prayer Book has been left almost entirely to poets and liturgists. Perhaps that is why it is now nearly dead, despite having the support of almost everyone of sense, taste or learning in the cultural establishment. In 1979, in revulsion against the 'alternative' services and jolly Bibles then being imposed by reforming clergy, a great petition was organ- ised to plead for the old and good, attracting such supporters as Iris Murdoch, Alan Ben- nett, A.J.P. Taylor, Ralph Richardson, Philip Larkin and John Gielgud. 'We are concerned,' they said, 'for the wellsprings of expressive power in the Authorised Version of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, the great originals of English life and lan- guage, informing piety and inspiring justice.' They warned of a 'terrible act of forgetting'. Their arguments were unanswerable and have never been adequately addressed by the reformers, whose eloquent response was to carry on reforming.
Such an assembly of wisdom and talent would have succeeded had they been trying to save an ancient woodland from the road- builders or, say, Shakespeare's plays from crass updating. But the petition, for all its grandeur, had no effect at all. What the defenders of the Prayer Book failed to grasp was that the innovators did not just wish to change the words. They wanted to change the world. It was England and the English idea of God that they wanted to modernise, and they couldn't do it without destroying one of the most beautiful books ever writ- ten. In the 20 years since, they have driven it to the margins of national worship.
This is despite the failure of the unloved Alternative Service Book, a treasury of `Gosh, don't they grow up so quickly?' banality now being recycled or thrown away without regret after two decades of continu- ing and accelerating Anglican decline though, to be fair, the modernisers never claimed that their changes would fill the churches. But the thing which replaces it, known as Common Worship, is still more dangerous to what is left of traditional Anglicanism. Hundreds of vicarages have already received a chirpy manual explaining how customised orders of service can be cre- ated from 'Common Worship', most of which is already available on the Internet. For as this guide explains, Common Wor- ship 'is not a book. It is a collection of ser- vices and resources that will be published in books, as separate booklets, on simple cards, on computer disks and on the Internet.'
Churches may download what they wish from the Net and assemble their own ser- vices according to choice — so that it is much more a Website of Diverse Devotion than a Book of Common Prayer. Many cler- gy are already inflicting versions of the new liturgy on their flocks, and some may even have copied the sample services in the handbook in which Confession is headlined by the words 'We say "Sorry" ', or 'Dishing the dirt on ourselves'. A progressive van- guard will perhaps follow the hints on how to dispense with books altogether and use an overhead projector instead so that the congregation 'are free to clap or do other demonstrative things with their hands'. Many of the new prayers are still more woe- ful and embarrassing than the early modem liturgies produced 20 and 30 years ago. The hope that there might be some sort of retreat from ugly modernisation, like British Telecom's rediscovery of red phone boxes, is not borne out by a Communion service which opens its account of the Last Supper with the words 'On the night before he died he had supper with his friends'.
At least the Alternative Service Book was a book and pretended to be an alternative. The pretence was misleading but important, since it implied that the Prayer Book would remain in widespread use. Common Wor- ship, with apparent generosity, contains a few disembodied slices of a la carte Cran- mer. These are the melancholy remnants which are still occasionally paraded at cathedral evensongs or at dawn services for grimly determined traditionalists. But the survival of a few old words in the new books will instantly make it less worthwhile for any publisher to print large numbers of tra- ditional Prayer Books for sale to churches. Within ten years, 1662 may survive only as an academic volume, in the handsome Everyman edition, or as a pretty souvenir — but will no longer be held in the hands of worshippers. And, as the last old-fashioned Anglicans go to their graves, Thomas Cran- mer's prayers will for ever cease to be heard in the churches where they resonated for almost five centuries. By then, a multicul- tural God will no doubt be a European citi- zen and we will all pray daily for salvation by higher public spending.
Previous page
