What are you doing for the Coronation? I mean you. Of course we know we all get a public holiday and there will be commemorative mugs and other china and (if there is still some sort of postal service running) stamps. But… parishes, schools, youth groups, various organisations…what will be happening?
At the last Coronation, there was a lot to celebrate. A radiant young sovereign, a sense that a rightful victory had been obtained at great sacrifice in war, and a nation conscious of its heritage and history. Anyone over 40 had been brought up by parents raised in Queen Victoria’s reign. Britain’s achievements were recognised and understood, from Brunel’s engineering to Florence Nightingale’s creation of the modern nursing profession, and were seen as belonging not just to the named individuals but to the nation. People thought of the country as a “we” and an “us.”
Today, when we are all expected to be uncertain about ourselves and our bonds with one another, this confident sense of community has been badly dented. It is not just the denouncing of much of our history that has caused this – the toppling of statues and so on – although the campaigns are very draining. It is the idea that neighbourliness is somehow wrong, that it is better to create divisions along lines of race or class than to foster togetherness and goodwill.
There are no easy solutions to this, but as Catholics we have a great deal to offer in terms of a wider look at Britain’s history. No, we don’t want to start campaigning as a victim-group – anyone with half a knowledge of history is vaguely aware of the religious strife and anti-Catholic laws in Britain’s story. The topic is richer than that. And we can afford to be generous: today the names of Catholic martyrs are part of the fabric of towns and suburbs – not only John Fisher and Thomas More but Edmund Campion and Margaret Clitheroe, Richard Reynolds and John Payne (picked at random from a lengthy list of primary and secondary schools in Britain before me as I write), and we’ve had two hugely successful papal visits and the repeal of the last remaining restrictions on Catholics in public life.
We need to remind people of the depth and strength of Britain’s Christian history. The Faith first arrived here when we were part of the Roman Empire – that same Roman Empire into which Christ was born. Ours is a religion rooted in the facts of history.
The fresh evangelisation of pagan Angles and Saxons following the Empire’s collapse is exceptionally well-documented. And the crowning and anointing of kings – all rooted back in the Scriptural account of King David and so on – is all bound up with the story over the next centuries. We don’t have to pretend that it’s all a glorious story of unbroken Christian civilisation – we all know about wars and strife, cruelties, battles, dungeons, torture and injustice. But we do need to know that, living in today’s really rather benign and comfortable constitutional monarchy is a great privilege – and celebrating the links of our history is nourishing, valuable and necessary.
Above all, we need to celebrate the Christian faith that is at the core of the Coronation ceremony. This is an opportunity to teach, explaining the subject using the Scriptures and teaching the history going back through to the crowning of kings that pre-dates the Norman Conquest.
Today, loneliness and a sense of isolation are festering problems. Friendships among the young can be fragile and destroyed by internet gossip. Family networks can be snapped by the break-up of a partnership that robs children of half of their grandparents, aunts and uncles. And an apparently unremitting blur of jargon-filled propaganda, much of it funded by you and me through taxation, rails against the reality of sexual difference, and marriage as a male-female bond.
Teaching a sense of belonging, of being part of a “we”, and an “us”, not just “me, me, me” is essential in maintaining sanity – it always has been and it always will be. A solemn and sacred celebration in which the Sovereign is anointed is something to mark and honour. And in explaining the Christian message that lies at its heart we will be placing the Christian faith in its proper perspective. As the splendid Malcolm Muggeridge wrote of Christianity: “Our civilisation was born of it, is sustained by it, and will most certainly perish without it.”
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