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THE Church’s official presence at Remembrance Day ceremonies does not mean that it supports war, the Bishop of Manchester, who is the National Chaplain of the Royal British Legion, said this week.
The Bishop, the Rt Revd Nigel McCulloch, is to lead prayers at the Legion’s Festival of Remembrance in the Royal Albert Hall tomorrow. He denied that there was any contradiction between the Church’s opposition to militarism and his official presence at Remembrance ceremonies.
“It is wholly irrelevant question, whether this appears to support war. The sole purpose is to honour those who have given their lives in war at the call of their nation. It is a wholly non-political point at which we rightly remember those who have fallen,” he said on Tuesday. “It is not encouraging militarism, and there is no sense of glorifying war. Instead, it is a quiet and sombre moment.”
It was the Church’s job to eliminate the conditions that led to warfare, he said. “I think it was Earl Haig who told a bishop: ‘Your job is to make sure my job is unnecessary.’”
The Bishop was chosen as National Chaplain for the Legion because his father was killed in action in 1943, flying a Lancaster bomber over Holland. Bishop McCulloch said that he had no memory of his father.
One in six of the British population was eligible for support from the British Legion because they or their relatives had been bereaved or suffered through warfare, the Bishop said.
The two minutes’ silence at 11 a.m. on Saturday, commemorating the Armistice in 1918, was still relevant to most British people, suggests a survey of 1500 adults conducted by YouGov on behalf of the British Legion. Eighty-five per cent said it was relevant today.
Among the 18- to 29-year-olds, 81 per cent thought this year’s silence would be relevant for them. More than half those surveyed said they would be thinking of all conflicts, past and present. Those aged above 50 were most likely to think of those who had given their lives during the First and Second World Wars.
In Trafalgar Square on Saturday, a gathering of thousands is expected to maintain the two-minute silence, which will be ended with the Reveille, played by a bugler, and an RAF fly-past of four Typhoons. People are being asked to gather in the square from 10 a.m., and will be entertained by the all-girl music group All Angels. In Whitehall on Sunday, the National Service of Remembrance will take place at the Cenotaph. A wreath will be laid by the Queen, and other leading figures. The Bishop of London, the Rt Revd Richard Chartres, will officiate.
Fergal Keane, the war journalist and author, is due to present a selection of readings on the theme of the road to war, its pity, its end, and its memory at Westminster Abbey this evening. The Abbey choir and the English Chamber Orchestra are performing works by Parry, Vaughan Williams, Howells, and Duruflé.
The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, has said that all creeds and races should unite to keep 11 November as a time of silence and prayer. |
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