Thinking Anglicans

Opinion – 8 May 2019

Jeremy Pemberton Thomson Reuters How will the Church of England respond to heterosexual civil partnerships?
“It isn’t clear if Church of England will agree to bless heterosexual civil partnerships officially, but not homosexual ones”

Edward Siddons interviews Andrew Foreshew-Cain for The GuardianThe rebel priest: ‘Gay people in the church are not going to go away’
“The Rev Andrew Foreshew-Cain says his same-sex marriage cost him his ministry. Now he is launching a campaign for the rights of LGBTQ Christians”

Giles Fraser UnHerd Where did the Church’s land go?
“The C of E hasn’t covered itself in glory when it comes to land management”

Rosie Harper and Alan Wilson ViaMedia.News Safeguarding & Survival Systems – Loyalty vs Trust

 

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Paul Waddington
Paul Waddington
5 years ago

The following paragraph in Giles Fraser’s article attracted my attention: It’s an interesting approach. For if there is a question of theft here, it is how the church came by its land in the first place. Glebe was given to the Church of England by Henry VIII as a sort of baptism present at the Reformation. It became the principal endowment of the church. This was mostly land, perhaps four million acres, that was stolen – and I don’t think that is too strong a word – from the Roman Catholic church, along with the dissolution of the monasteries in… Read more »

Susannah Clark
Reply to  Paul Waddington
5 years ago

Out of curiosity, why did that paragraph attract your attention, Paul? Is seizure of land that significant, happening so many centuries ago? Wasn’t the Church’s tenure of so much land, before and after the Reformation, at odds with the example of the carpenter’s son anyway? Speaking as a direct descendant of the Stuart monarchs, please could England, Scotland and Wales be returned to the descendants of the Celts and the ancient inhabitants of Britain before them? If you’re Anglo-Saxon English, you seized our lands. Should all land in the USA be returned to its indigenous people? Henry’s action was political… Read more »

T Pott
T Pott
Reply to  Paul Waddington
5 years ago

Canon Fraser’s allegation is indeed very startling. What is this “Roman Catholic Church” to which he refers? Does he mean pre-Reformation Western Christendom? If so, that split in 1534, and Italy had no more right to English ecclesiastical endowments than Spain had to German ones. Or is he referring to the body which continued to exist in Italy, Spain etc? Does Canon Fraser think all English ecclesiastical revenues belonged forever to the Pope of Rome? If not, how could they have been stolen from him? Or does he, by Roman Catholic, refer to the English recusants? Is he denying the… Read more »

Paul Waddington
Paul Waddington
Reply to  T Pott
5 years ago

Giles Fraser states that vast quantities of land were stolen (with emphasis on the word stolen) from the “Roman Catholic Church”. This would clearly imply that, in Giles Fraser’s view, the rightful owners were the Roman Catholic Church. In fact most of this land belonged to numerous monasteries, which, in a vicarious way, could be regarded as the Catholic Church.

I would conclude that, by describing the hand over of land as a baptism present, Giles Fraser is asserting that the Church of England was “born” in the sixteenth century. He is, of course completely correct in this assertion.

Stanley Monkhouse
5 years ago

I’d love to read Harper & Wilson. But eyesight means kindle. Any chance?

RosalindR
RosalindR
Reply to  Stanley Monkhouse
5 years ago

Amazon are advertising it on Kindle. (for hard copy I was delighted to discover that Blackwells was cheaper than Amazon!)

Stanley Monkhouse
Reply to  RosalindR
5 years ago

thanks. I missed that.

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