ANOTHER VOICE

Tu es Petrus et in hoc petro aedificabo ecclesiam meam

AUBERON WAUGII

'This is an historic occasion,' said Canon David Goldie at the dedication of the first purpose-built ecumenical city church in Britain — the new £5 million church of St Christ the Cornerstone, Mil- ton Keynes — last week. And so, of course, it was. Canon Goldie may not be able to compete with Peter Simple's Reverend Eric Shrike, Vicar of the Church of Christ the Non-Smoker, Turgis Hill, in the single- mindedness of his mission. Mr Shrike, on Sunday, called for a 'supreme effort' to extirpate 'this last and greatest of all evils, this primal sin which, to speak in allegory, may have begun when Adam and Eve smoked their first cigarettes in the Garden, and thus brought death into the world and all our woe'.

But then one could scarcely expect Canon Goldie to compete with Peter Sim- ple in anything. The time is long since past when the Church could reckon to attract the brightest and best — men of intelli- gence and promise like More, Wolsey, Erasmus, Richelieu, Mazarin — as the most obvious ladder for their ambitions. The group that gathered in Milton Keynes on Friday included the Archbishop of Can- terbury, Cardinal Hume, the leaders of Methodist, Baptist and United Reformed groups and the Queen, suitably clad in a pontifical red coat over a Paisley dress. It must have been one of the gloomiest gath- erings in England which heard Cardinal Hume, on behalf of Christ the Corner- stone, say: 'May this church in Milton Keynes be a pledge of our common com- mitment, a signpost to an increasingly shared future and a beacon of hope for the whole community.'

The gloom which attended this historic occasion would not necessarily have been caused by scepticism about the workings of the Holy Ghost, in concert with Christ the Cornerstone, to bring the Christian church- es together again. It would have been caused by the enforced optimism at an event which, in fact, marks an admission of failure by all the participants. In the same way Dr Peter Carnley, when laying his hands on ten Australian women recently in the hope that it would somehow ordain them priests to do so, announced: 'Today we ordain ten but liberate tens of thou- sands.'

Once again, we should feel nothing but pleasure at the thought of those tens of thousands of liberated sheilas bouncing around in Western Australia, if Dr Carnley honestly thinks he has liberated them. But a suspicion arises from the fact that the great sheila liberation movement coincides with a catastrophic shortage of priests. Is he really concerned to liberate women, or simply to fill the vacant situations, and how long will it be before advanced theology, in tune with the green movement, starts ordaining and liberating all the kangaroos of Western Australia in their tens of thou- sands?

This may seem a cynical attitude to take, but there is plenty of other evidence that the new indifferentism — once condemned as the mother of all modern heresies springs from desperation rather than from a sudden vision of alternative truth. Neces- sity was always the mother of invention, of course, but need it also mother quite so much enthusiasm?

'A very special characteristic of this church is that it has been planned and built with the whole Christian community in mind,' said Cardinal Hume. Yes, yes. We got the message. Looking at its design — by no means as disgusting as Paddy's Wigwam in Liverpool, or the atrocious Roman Catholic cathedral in Clifton — it crosses my mind that a lantern on top of the dome might yet double up as a minaret, from which the muezzin can call the Islamic faithful of Milton Keynes to prayer on a Friday, even as the rabbis move in on Sat- urday and Christian anti-smoking counsel- lors stand by for their Cornerstone Coffee Sessions on Sunday.

If people say that we are far removed from the jump to any wider ecumenism, I can only draw attention to Dr Carey's break with a 150-year-old tradition in refus- ing to become patron of the Missionary Society, the Church's ministry among Jews. His reason for this, plainly stated, is that he now thinks it wrong to convert Jews to Christianity. Never mind about the Chris- tian's charitable obligation to bring all to the Way, the Truth and the Light. It was up to Dr Carey to 'do all in my power to encourage trust and friendship between the different faith communities in our land'.

It goes without saying that the Jewish religious establishment is delighted by this development. Neither of the other great monotheistic religions — Judaism or Islam — has quite reached our own semi-col- lapsed state.

There may be inexorable historical rea- sons for the collapse of Marxism as an eco- nomic creed, but I can think of no reason for the collapse of Christianity vis-a-vis the other great world religions unless it is something to do with the falling sperm count.

Even those who thought Carey was putting up some sort of Last Stand for orthodoxy against homosexual takeover when he succeeded in banning the SPCK manual, Daring to Speak Love's Name should look again at what he actually said.

One could easily suppose, from the bare fact of Carey's having threatened to resign the presidency of SPCK if it went ahead with the book, that he disapproved of homosexuality. He might even, in an awk- ward moment, have remembered the vari- ous biblical references to it as an abomina- tion, crying out to Heaven for vengeance.

However, this was not, apparently, the basis of his objection. He found it 'regrettable' that prayers for people with Aids should appear alongside liturgies for people 'com- ing out'.

'Surely this will only foster the myth that HIV and Aids are confined to the homo-

sexual community. I find it difficult to regard this book as the contribution to the educational process for which the bishops called.'

Anglicans in this day and age have simply got to accept that Aids has absolutely noth- ing to do with anal intercourse. If they are not prepared to make that one little act of faith, they will be refused coffee in Nerd- ley's new Pantheistic Temple of Christ the Left-Hander...

It becomes easier and easier to imagine that Peter Simple — or at any rate Michael Wharton, his creator — is God: not just writing the history of our times, but in the particular sense of continuous creation, that we all exist only as reflections of his benign imagination.

This year, to the relief of all, he wrote on Sunday, there was no 'unseemly protest at the Tomb of the Unknown Non-Smoker over the implication, regarded by some as heretical, that it is possible to die from a cause other than smoking. There is a small, growing sect of mystical non-smokers who hold that non-smoking can actually ensure immortality...'

I can think of no religious need in the modern world which would not be met by quiet weekly readings from Simple's 'Way of the World' in the Sunday Telegraph.