Back in July, when my dear 85-year-old mother was admitted to the hospice where she still clings to life, the sweet-natured doctor on duty asked her a few simple questions to gauge the state of her marbles.
‘Can you tell me who the Prime Minister is?’ My mother replied: ‘He’s a silly twit called David Cameron.’
Could she count backwards from ten? She could, no problem at all. If she’d been asked, she could also have recited the seven times table backwards from 1,400.
She’s always been good at mental arithmetic — a gift which, alas, she failed to pass on to her innumerate second son.
A few practical questions followed about her stay in the hospice. Did she have any special dietary requirements? None.
Were there any members of her family she would prefer not to visit her?
She paused, for what I hope was comic effect, before she croaked a laugh and said: ‘No, I love them all.’ Just as well, since most of us were gathered round her bed.
But her answer to the next question took us all aback. ‘Are you religious?’ asked the doctor. And without a second’s hesitation, my mother replied: ‘No.’
My siblings and I looked at each other with open mouths. The thought occurred to us that perhaps she’d gone doolally after all.
It was the older of my two sisters who broke the silence to say what was on all our minds: ‘But, Mummy, you’ve never missed a Sunday’s church in your whole life — and you’ve been to Mass every single day for years.’
‘Well, of course I have,’ said my mother. ‘But that’s only because I live so near the Cathedral. It doesn’t mean I’m religious,’ and she uttered the word as if it was mildly insulting, not quite comme il faut.
After my initial surprise, I think I understood what she meant. In her book, to be truly ‘religious’ you must be a bit of an obsessive, a zealot on a mission to spread the Word, guided in your every action and utterance by spiritual considerations.
Devastation: Two women embrace at a vigil outside Church House following the announcement of the rejection of the motion to allow women archbishopsHer own Roman Catholic faith, though as firm and unquestioning as any I’ve come across in my 59 years, is of a different nature.
Unless I’ve got her quite wrong, she regards the mysteries of the Fall of Man, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, Salvation and the Sacraments simply as facts of everyday life, to be accepted without fuss or fervour, like sunshine, rain and the gas bill.
Others may have their doubts — and they are to be pitied for them — but that’s their business. She has never made a song and dance about her beliefs. Except in our earliest childhood, or when we had priests to dinner (which was more often, I grant you, than in most families), she didn’t expect us to say grace at meal times.
And when, at around the age of 13, I decided I preferred my Sunday lie-ins to joining her and my siblings at boring old Mass, she made only a token protest.
A truly religious parent, by what I imagine to be her definition, would have nagged me incessantly to go to church and forced me to have my filthy little soul cleansed, whether I liked it or not.
More... Heads of Church told to get help from mediators amid growing anger over vote against women bishops 'Very grim day': Next Archbishop of Canterbury tweets his verdict after Church of England Synod rejected women bishops DAILY MAIL COMMENT: A sad day that leaves the Church in chaosAs you will have guessed, then, when I say of myself that I’m not religious, I use the word in its more common sense. I’ve tried to believe — and there are rare moments, even now, when I think I do. But most of the time, I don’t. I haven’t been to Confession for 45 years, and I go to Mass once in a blue moon — usually just to keep my wife company.
So I can imagine many readers will be thinking that I — as a Roman Catholic and a rotten, agnostic one at that — have no business to be lecturing the Church of England on whether or not it should approve the consecration of women as bishops.
But I protest that it is my business, quite as much as anybody else’s.
I say this not because my father was a staunch Anglican and pillar of the C of E.
Nor is it because — although this is equally true — my C of E education seared into my heart the sublime poetry of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible, instilling in me a lifelong affection for my father’s church.
Wrongdoing: Dr Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, was said to be deeply saddened by the result during a meeting of the General Synod of the Church of EnglandNo, the decisions of the General Synod are my business, and everybody else’s in this country, because of the special status of the Church of England as a body established by statute.
The measures and canons approved by its synod are part of the law of the land. Its two archbishops, and 24 of its bishops, have seats in our legislature. And because of its favoured treatment by governments over the centuries, the Church sits on a portfolio of investments worth some £8 billion.
Unlike other churches, therefore, it is not an exclusive sect, to be treated by its active members or clergy as their private plaything. It’s a national institution, whose ex officio Supreme Governor (a woman, as many have noticed) reigns sovereign over us all.
Its function is to give a moral lead, not just to its own churchgoers but to the entire nation, through Parliament. In that sense, it is our church, whether we subscribe to its beliefs or not.
So we’re all entitled to a hearing for our views on the synod’s decisions. And, for what they are worth, these are mine.
When the C of E first agreed to ordain women as priests, some 20 years ago, my every instinct as a diehard, reactionary Tory told me that this was a lousy idea, dreamt up by feminist troublemakers.
It offended my guiding principle in life, more political than theological, that unless there are compelling reasons for change, things should go on as they have always done. Indeed, my brand of Toryism was beautifully encapsulated by the late, great Tory Colin Welch (formerly of this parish), in a story he told about the night he shared a room with the Left-wing idealist editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, in a tumbledown hotel in Ghana.
‘Kingsley’s bed was positioned diagonally in the middle of the room,’ he wrote, ‘like a battleship in the board game Jutland.
‘Against my advice, he moved it tidily into a corner.
‘That night there was a terrific storm, with rain bouncing six feet and fireballs hurtling like flaming onions in all directions. Kingsley was drenched; before it was moved, his bed had been in the one dry area.’
Colin’s moral? ‘Respect what seems irrational; it may serve some deep but hidden purpose.’ Such were my feelings about the ordination of women.
Crushed: Dr Rowan Williams, seen here comforting a colleague after the vote, had campaigned for legislation approving women bishopsThough I could think of no very sensible reason for excluding them from the priesthood, I imagined conservative theologians knew what they were talking about, and thought gloomily than any change would probably be for the worse.
The past two decades, in which women priests have made such a huge contribution to keeping the leaking hulk of the C of E afloat, have completely changed my mind.
As for the theological arguments for rejecting women bishops while accepting women priests (and a woman Supreme Governor), they seem downright batty to me. Indeed, they might have sprung straight from the script of Monty Python’s semi-blasphemous Life Of Brian.
Yet these were the arguments, which have nothing to do with the recorded words of Christ, which triumphed in the synod this week, when fractionally over a third of the House of Laity overturned the will of the huge majority of the church’s bishops, clergy and diocese.
That’s not to mention the views of most of the British public who, insofar as they care at all, regard the vote’s outcome as a gratuitous and baffling insult to women.
After all, we can all understand the theological and biological case against gay marriage, whether we agree with it or not. But what have chromosomes and reproductive organs got to do with episcopal duties?
I would defend to my last breath the right of other churches, such as my mother’s, to espouse opinions the British public find hard to understand or swallow.
But I come back to the point that the C of E is our national church, with special privileges that give it special responsibilities. Its historic inclusivity may have been the source of many of its weaknesses — its woolliness and its sometimes achingly embarrassing efforts to be trendy.
But it has also been its special strength that it offers a welcome to the doubtful.
My fear is that the triumphant, zealous minority in the House of Laity may have hastened its transformation from a national institution into an exclusive, unwelcoming sect for the religious (in my mother’s sense of the word).
At a time when the country has never been in greater need of friendly moral guidance — on everything from mass abortion to family breakdown and the insidious spread of euthanasia in the NHS — I find this very sad.
