Church

• The Anglican Church in Ghana is no longer Anglo-Catholic. I’ve long stopped being surprised or angry really. This stuff is now mainline old hat like another of their favourite subjects. (If one of their denominations quits Christianity like the Unitarians, that would be unsurprising but news.) Besides your bishop gets to chat with the Queen every 10 years, Anglicanism means everything’s subject to change by vote (and nobody tells us who we can’t sleep with, going back to a certain king). It’s not about the girls or the gays but a fallible church. Never been to Ghana but once knew a priest from there and Brother Stephen’s been. He said their services were still nicely high and many churches still treasured their English Missals. Solution: African ordinariates? I imagine there might be enough residual ACism in South Africa (where ACs and the British in general opposed apartheid — as many readers know, I was acquainted with a priest who was kicked out of the South African territory of Namibia in the ’60s... Brother says a young Fr Tutu used to pray the Rosary at demonstrations) to make it so. Reminds me a bit of another West African ex-colony now a country, Gabon, where Lefebvre served as Archbishop of Dakar (Senegal like Gabon was in French West Africa) and was so liked that the SSPX have a following there. Photo: Canon Victor Leon Acquaye in Ghana.
• Brother Stephen taught me of a bygone lay ministry in churches (like beadles and the people collecting pew fees): dog-whippers! Not because churches had anything against dogs but quite the opposite. I shouldn’t forget that dogs in church were quite common in the day and that one of the things that shocked Muslims about Christian churches was that dogs ran free in them. Which of course caused problems, hence this ‘venerable ecclesiastical office’. Bowrr!

Labels: Anglicanism, history