Your answers
What is the best way for a church to provide affirmation and support for bisexuals?
I and other Anglican Christians who were baptised and confirmed according to the Book of Common Prayer have pledged ourselves to renounce the devil and the world’s vain pomp, along with coveting “and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that [we] will not follow them”.
This is our Church’s doctrinal norm and is, therefore, generally commendable, and all the more so in the over-permissive sex-obsessed “Western world” of today; hence we should recommend bisexual people to marry for life a person of opposite settled sex, or else be celibate, perhaps in a same-sex sworn friendship and/or civil partnership.
Frank McManus (Reader Emeritus)
Todmorden
Your questions
What is the current law regarding the administration of holy communion to a sick person? Given the Sacrament Act 1547 and Article XXX in the Thirty-Nine Articles, can a sick person insist on receiving in both kinds either by means of a celebration of the eucharist at the sick person’s location, or from the Sacrament reserved in both kinds? Many years ago, my father told me that in hospital he had received holy communion from an Anglican chaplain, and that it had taken the form of a consecrated wafer that had been previously dipped in consecrated wine. Is that form of Reservation still practised?
T. R. F.
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