Mary Kenny
Coptic Archbishop Anba Angaelos If I were asked to preside over, or contribute to, a humanist funeral, or a “naming ceremony” for the children of non-believers, I would have to respond that I was not the appropriate person, since I am a Catholic Christian.
Yet it seems that some atheists or agnostics, when asked to sponsor a child for a Christian ceremony, accept the honour with alacrity and proceed without a second thought.
It would seem that this is the case with John Halligan, the Independent Waterford TD, and junior business minister.
A public and declared atheist, he nevertheless agreed to be the sponsor for his godson’s Confirmation, and was crestfallen when told that he “did not meet the criteria” for the position of Christian confirmation sponsor.
‘Petty’
He described the Bishop of Waterford’s decision to rule him out as “petty”, even while accepting that, indeed, he did not meet the criteria!
He said that he found it “appalling that my godson’s parents had to sit down with him, days before his Confirmation, and explain to the child that I was not permitted to be his sponsor.” A father of three daughters, Mr Halligan said that he had accepted the Confirmation role with his godson because “of the close bond I have with him”.
But sponsoring a Confirmation, or being a Godparent, is not about having a “close bond”. It’s about being a witness to a key Christian ritual: and in the case of a godparent, being a guarantor of the Christian spiritual welfare of the godchild.
Perhaps this hasn’t been made clear enough by Christians and Catholics themselves. Perhaps it isn’t taught properly at catechetics. Perhaps too many parents have come to regard sacramental occasions as simply rites of passage and occasions to dress up. Perhaps.
But Mr Halligan is a representative of parliamentary democracy, presumably intelligent enough and certainly outspoken enough to put two and two together: if you are a publicly self-declared atheist it shows, at the very least, rather poor judgement to agree to take a leading role in what is a serious Christian ceremony.
Prince Charles’ Orthodox views
Those who joined the two billion other people on the planet watching the wedding on TV of Harry and Meghan last Saturday will have observed how an unfamiliar cleric, in unusual headgear, led the (modernized) version of the Lord’s Prayer at the Windsor Chapel service.
He was the Coptic Archbishop Anba Angaelos [pictured], representing the Coptic Christian churches of Egypt (and elsewhere) in London.
I would wager that his presence was due to Prince Charles’s influence. Charles is very interested in both the Orthodox and Coptic churches – the Orthodox for their often beautiful ceremony and the Coptics being among the earliest of Christians, in Egypt and the Middle East. And of course his father, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was raised in the Greek Orthodox tradition, and is apparently still attached to it.
The Prince of Wales will be coming to Cork and Kerry on June 14, and anyone engaged in conversation with him might wish to ask him about his interest in the eastern Christian faiths.
A strange parallel democratic outcome?
The Governor of the Bank of England; the President of the United States; the Chancellor of the Exchequer and directors of Her Majesty’s Treasury; the Prime Minister and all main political parties; the House of Lords; the head of NATO; the head of the International Monetary Fund; the Confederation of British Industries; the BBC; academics at Oxford, Cambridge and nearly all leading academics elsewhere in Britain; the influential Economist magazine and the equally influential Financial Times; most High Court Judges; most show business celebrities; most leading figures in literature and most figures in the arts world, including curators of national museums; the bishops and archbishops of the Church of England and the Catholic church.
This is part of the roll-call of important individuals and institutions who urged the British people not to vote for Brexit. But despite the advice of so many experts and celebrities, the people went out and, by a majority of 4%, still stubbornly voted their way.
Vote
I have a vote in Kent, but I did not cast a vote for Brexit because I feared that it would not be the right course for Ireland. Yet I could scarce forebear some admiration for the sheer obstinacy and defiance of struggling Ramsgate fishermen and working-class Sunderland car workers to refuse to defer to the repeated counsel of “their betters”.
And, as so many show-biz celebrities, fashionable historians and academics, rich writers like Irvine Welsh and film stars like Liam Neeson, plus the entire foreign media urged the Irish public to vote to remove the Eighth Amendment from the Irish Constitution and move away from “mediaeval” and “flat earth” thinking, I wondered if we would see a strange parallel democratic outcome by the end of this week…