RC report on same-sex relations
From Mr Joseph Egerton
Madam, — Your headline “Vatican distances itself from LGBTQ+ report” (News, 22 May) is somewhat misleading. A person dealing with a media inquiry from a Spanish news agency gave an entirely correct statement that the report was the report of a synodical working group and had not been given any further approval. That can be given only after proper consideration.
Until recently, such documents were created and circulated in the Curia but not published, at least until well after a final decree had been issued. The archives of Trent and Vatican II show that the first drafts of decrees were presented and either rejected and replaced or substantially amended in closed sessions. Nobody who looks at the now published records of these councils should be surprised that the current report has received “non placet” from cardinals and bishops. It is, unsurprisingly, taking time to adjust to a new process based on “a spirit of transparency and accountability”, in which working papers are published and generate public responses.
The dicasteries that make up the Roman Curia are creatures of the Pope and act in his name and with his authority — sometimes — as with Fiducia supplicans — a Pope’s express approval. They have no other source of authority. If the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) were publicly to declare the report of the synodical working party to be heretical, contrary to the Tradition of the Church, or blasphemous, that would indeed be a serious matter. The DDF has not done so. Pope Leo has not issued a motu proprio or encyclical contradicting the report. By making it clear that this is simply a working paper with which everyone — cardinals, bishops, priests, and laity — is welcome to agree or disagree, the Vatican is not distancing itself from anything.
The truly valuable achievement, to date, of the synodical process is to bring a widespread recognition of how very cruel the historic presentation of doctrine has been to anyone who is LGTBQ+, to their families and their friends. Cardinal Mario Grech has given witness to his deep sorrow that he once caused real grief and suffering by the way he set it out as a new bishop. It would be truly astonishing if Pope Leo had not come to appreciate how much suffering was caused by earlier presentation of doctrine.
The teaching of the Roman Catholic Church has not been altered by the steps taken under Pope Francis to reverse an impression that LGTBQ+ individuals are not welcome in the Church. The report has not altered the teaching. It is important to be clear, however, that teaching can develop, can be brought up-to-date, and can be recovered. These are the processes that St John Henry Newman, a Doctor of the Church, saw as necessary if the Church was to remain true and alive: he wrote of the Church’s adherence to the great idea of Christianity: “To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” Vatican II showed that the Church could change while remaining true to her Founder.
As the report is digested, there may or may not be changes. The Holy Spirit is not absent or silent: the Spirit enables the Church to progress through debate and dialogue. The process is often uncomfortable, but then we were warned that none of this would be easy: “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” (Matthew 10.34, 35). And this may take time. The Holy Spirit is not bound to respect a timetable set by Mr Musk’s X.
JOSEPH EGERTON
Canterbury
Anti-pew argument fails to win amenity societies
From the Chair of the Joint Committee of National Amenity Societies
Madam, — The Church’s remarkable inheritance deserves more serious treatment than David Lee’s article (Comment, 1 May; Letters, 8 May) affords it.
His call to “get rid of” pews is a misplaced and error-strewn answer to a more complex question. It rests on a false opposition between mission and heritage, as though churches must choose between being either usable or being historic. In practice, many can and do achieve both.
The article’s central claims — that pews exclude families or damage health — are simply asserted, not evidenced, and ultimately unconvincing. Mr Lee inaccurately claims that pews are “all about control”, and goes on to assert that medieval churches had no benches. In fact, there are a great many churches across the country which preserve at least vestiges of their medieval benches (the nave of St Peter’s, Cassington, in Oxfordshire, for example, still retains its 800-year-old bench seating).
Beyond factual error, however, lies the article’s central misconception: that decline and growth in church life are determined by furniture. This is simply untrue.
The objective of the national amenity societies and others encouraging conservation is not to prevent all alteration, but to sustain historic buildings for public benefit, and to ensure that any change is well-informed, sympathetic, and proportionate. Our aim is to see these buildings not merely preserved, but well cared for, and in active and sustainable use.
NICHOLA TASKER
c/o The secretary, Joint Committee of National Amenity Societies
London E1
From Kate Currie
Madam, — As a holy duster, may I plead for the preservation of pews. Three swipes of a feather duster does a whole pew. It would take at least five swipes per chair, and that’s before dealing with the hymn-book box. . .
KATE CURRIE
London N17
Rewilding and the Church Commissioners’ land
From Dr Sharon Hall
Madam, — I welcome the detailed report from Wild Card which makes a clear financial and fiduciary case for the affordability of the Church Commissioners’ protection of 30 per cent of its land for nature by 2030 (News, 1 May). I also welcome the changes that some Church Commissioners’ tenant farmers have made to enhance biodiversity on Church-owned land. The statistics quoted from the Commissioners’ farmland survey require some caution, however, since only around half their tenants have responded.
If 90 per cent of participants in a weight-loss programme are trumpeted to be satisfied with their weight-loss, it would be important to understand that the 90 per cent related only to the half of the participants who responded to a survey. The non-respondents may have had very different experiences! Ninety per cent of responding tenants are engaged in some work to boost biodiversity, but it seems likely that tenants relying on conventional farming methods and making no efforts to improve biodiversity on the land they farm are in the non-responding half.
The Church Commissioners’ Management Plan for the National Estate for Nature missed the opportunity to set ambitious, area-based targets for contributing to the global 30by30 goal, focusing instead on work already under way. There is some good practice on protected wildlife sites in particular, but the other goals stated in the report seem minor in the face of the escalating biodiversity and climate crises.
Operation Noah has been calling for emissions from Church-owned land to be included in Net Zero targets, since landholdings generate more emissions than all church buildings put together. This is part of our broader vision for how church land can be used for the benefit of climate and nature. The Church of England’s General Synod meeting in July is an important opportunity to review progress on decarbonisation plans, as well as to debate 30by30 should Canon Valerie Plumb’s Private Member’s Motion be taken up, as many of us hope it will be.
SHARON HALL
Campaign Manager
Operation Noah
London SE1
From Mr Nigel Edward-Few
Madam, — So, the Church Commissioners are sitting on 11.1 billion and they are being urged to spend 20 million on “rewilding”.
How about spending some of this year’s growth, then, of £660 million on ministry, supporting some of our poorer benefices, and on the poor themselves and those having to choose between food or housing and utility costs — perhaps the real work of God’s Church?
What a headline that would be!
NIGEL EDWARD-FEW
Chesham
Online congregations
From Penny Keens
Madam, — Until the Covid pandemic, I went to church every Sunday with my husband, and with our daughters while they lived at home. During the pandemic, we worshipped on line: our city-centre church offered live-streamed services, but we enjoyed “visiting” cathedrals and churches at home and abroad.
Now I am an 85-year-old widow, I still worship every Sunday, preferably in church, but otherwise taking part online. The number of watchers shown are frequently in the upper teens. Church attendance may not have reached pre-pandemic levels (News, 15 May), but I guess there are more of us in the ether.
PENNY KEENS
Milton Keynes
Meaning of the term porneia for biblical writers
From the Revd Paul Burr
Madam, — Pace Jonathan Goll (1 May): the notion that a word is limited to its derivation is reductionist and fallacious. Words have uses, not just meanings. The frame of reference for apostolic doctrine is not classical Greek literature, but the Septuagint, where porneia and its cognates are numerous. They eventuate in an ethic distinctive from paganism and critical to the call to holiness.
Whatever its etymology, in the scriptures porneia is not limited to prostitution. In 1 Corinthians 5, St Paul protests that a church member is sleeping with his father’s wife. In 1 Corinthians 10, St Paul alludes to the Baal-Peor affair in Numbers 25. Jude 7 includes homosexuality. None of this is about prostitution — nor in Matthew 15.19, Mark 7.21, or John 8.41.
The list of prohibitions from the Council of Jerusalem is rooted in Leviticus: chapter 17 prohibits the eating of blood (so also things strangled), and chapter 18 delineates a definitive sexual boundary by prohibiting sex with close relatives, father, mother, father’s wife, sister, step-sister, granddaughter, step-granddaughter, aunt, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, mother and daughter, neighbour’s wife, idolatrously, homosexually, or with animals — hence the Church of England’s prohibitions in its Tables of Kindred and Affinity and the doctrine of marriage expressed in the canons and the liturgy of marriage; hence also the translation of porneia as “sexual immorality” in Bibles.
Canon Angela Tilby (Comment, 17 April) wants clarity on fornication. Is she serious? Is she really asking the bishops to teach on sexual immorality? Isn’t that exactly what has riven the Church and the Anglican Communion from top to bottom in the past three years and why the Living in Love and Faith project has just been shelved?
PAUL BURR
Swardeston, Norwich
The intentional use of a Christian vogue word
From the Revd Stephen Collier
Madam, — You carried an advert in your paper for a book, Dwelling Places: The practice and witness of intentional Christian communities (15 May, page 27). Why are more and more Christians obsessed with this word “intentional”? We are all being urged to be more “intentional” in our faith. But has it any meaning?
I heard a preacher on UCB Radio this week say thatm after Jesus fed the five thousand, he “intentionally” went into the mountain to pray. Wasn’t everything Jesus did intentional?
On BBC Radio 4 Sunday Worship on 24 May, the preacher said “I want you to see the intentionality of God.” What on earth does this mean?
Surely, being intentional just means we intend to do something, and so we do it. An “intentional community” is just a community.
STEPHEN COLLIER
Greenford
Example of a pastoral approach to mission
From Canon R. H. W. Arguile
Madam, — When I moved to my new parish in 1995, the congregation numbered, at its lowest, 59 communicants. The churchwarden came to me with fifty names of people who had left the church in the previous few years. I visited them all. Some returned. I conducted my ministry on the basis of three principles: liturgy conducted to as high a standard as I could maintain, following Common Worship; teaching through courses run on the basis of the breadth of pastoral theology (Canon Tilby, Comment, 22 May); and visiting about 30 people per week. I attempted to respond to pastoral requests within a couple of days.
My retrospective opinion is that the least successful of the three was teaching. Over a short time, the number of communicants rose to somewhat fewer than 200. Having a beautiful church in the middle of the town enabled us to punch above our weight. We could reckon on more than 400 attending Christmas services, although that was difficult to judge given twicers and thricers. Our annual stewardship campaign involved the visiting of more than 250 families with pastoral intent by some 20+ visitors. I wrote a weekly article for a local free newspaper.
My greatest failure was the result of attempting to run free, unstructured services. Other than worship, teaching, and pastoral care, none of them making use of new ideas — messy church, café church, and so on — I had no idea what to do. I dealt with the divisions in the congregation by adhering to what was in the book.
Somehow or other, I attracted several retired clergy whose main contribution was to take services in the deanery – I somehow or other became rural dean. But I had no real strategy at all. I suppose I adhered to Eliot’s apothegm “Take no thought for the harvest; only for proper sowing.” I stayed for 12 years. I didn’t know what I was doing, but it seemed by some criteria to work.
R. H. W. ARGUILE
Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk
The editor reserves the right to edit letters