The Book of Common Prayer should be our manifesto Conservative Anglicans should resist the temptation to convert to Roman Catholicism, says Peter Hitchens. It is the Church of England that is best placed to challenge our secularist age Peter Hitchens What a pity it is that all the hate and slime now directed against the Pope’s visit is not aimed instead at the Church of England. Why do God-haters and militant secularists have to turn on a pensionable German theology professor and head of a Rome-based religious multinational organisation, when they want to condemn the steadfast defence of Christian morality? For at least some Anglicans, the savaging of the Bishop of Rome will give rise to sinful pangs of envy. We would like Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman — and, I am rather compelled to mention, my brother Christopher — to be hurling their fiery darts at Thomas Cranmer’s church instead. But these professional scoffers unkindly refuse to scoff at our texts and formularies. They even put in a kind word for the beauty of Evensong, and the poetic majesty of the 1611 Bible and 1662 Prayer Book. In this they are mistaken, as we shall see, though not about the beauty or the majesty. More sensibly, they cannot find it in their hearts to loathe or rail at the exasperated, kindly, furry and baffled figure of Rowan, our Archbishop. Even so, Dr Williams is not in fact the Church of England, and nor are its current prelates, who squabble and chatter beneath the giant arches of the great cathedrals. A mighty institution, armed with scripture, tradition and reason, and adorned with centuries of poetry, courage and devotion looms behind them. Why is it that a foreign church, whose leader (according to the confident 37th of the 39 articles) ‘hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England’, is the chosen target of the modish ‘new’ atheists? Why is it that, in recent years, it has been generally assumed that any conservative religious person in this country is a Roman Catholic, or about to become one? Some of the approaching anti-papal protests will be in the old spirit of the Gordon Riots and the Shankill Road, an unreasoning bile against foreign prelacy. This has somehow survived the almost complete disappearance of educated Christian faith, scriptural knowledge, historical consciousness and Protestant observance among the people of these islands. The behaviour of the audience at a recent debate on the Roman Church in Central Hall, Westminster, showed that ancient, howling fury is still available to those who wish to lash it into life, and also that it is perhaps a little embarrassing to those who do so. Part of this rage, in its current form, is the undeniable problem of priestly paedophilia. But, leaving aside any other subtleties in this scandal, the shrieking tone and lofty righteousness of the condemnation imply that the Vatican actively mandated child sexual abuse by its clergy. The special condemnation reserved for the Romish church also suggests, absurdly, that such horrors never took place, or were covered up by, liberal secular institutions. They did, and have been. Yet this is never advanced as an argument against the secular liberal state (and it would be a bad argument, if it were). The sex scandal is not, as it happens, the real reason for the anger directed against the Bishop of Rome. If it were, then the undoubted case against the Roman Catholic hierarchy could be made without all the puce-faced exaggerations, straightforward lies and total lack of proportion which infect it. It is overblown precisely because it is not the true issue, but a pretext. This is what it is really about: the sons and daughters of the sexual revolution, the inheritors of 1968, are actively infuriated by anyone who dares to suggest that their behaviour in their personal lives might be, or might ever have been, selfish and absolutely wrong. The world glimpsed a premature flash of this militant, intolerant resentment in December 1989, when more than 100 people, swollen with anger at Cardinal O’Connor’s conservative views on abortion and homosexuality, were arrested for trying to disrupt and desecrate Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. ==================================================================================== But in those days, the protestors only harmed themselves. Mayor Ed Koch called their behaviour an ‘excrescence’ and the liberal New York Times snapped disapprovingly: ‘Far from inspiring sympathy, such a violation mainly offers another reason to reject both the offensive protesters and their ideas.’ In the intervening 21 years, mayors and liberal newspapers (on both sides of the Atlantic) have changed sides, as the 68ers have climbed to the very top of the new establishment. The baby boomers have finally won the cultural revolution, and they know it. They are now the righteous ones. Bob Geldof and Bono are more morally powerful than any cardinal. Their followers know they are good because they care. They worship at the Church of the Environment, in which Salvation comes by faith in windmills and solar panels, and where dissenters are hissed as intolerable and wicked heretics. But they proudly claim that they have never discriminated against anyone in their lives. They are used to defeatism, cowardice and simpering acquiescence from parents, teachers and other figures of authority, who are supposed to be impressed by their blazingly obvious personal superiority to everything and everybody that went before them. Click here for the rest of the article: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2010/09/the-book-of-common-prayer-should-be-our-manifesto/