“Sham” church weddings between foreign nationals are putting clergy under huge pressure, a NorthÂampton vicar said this week.
The Revd Michael Hills, Vicar of St Michael’s and of Holy Sepulchre, Northampton, has had three weddings raided by immigration officers as couples were about to get married. He said that his church appeared to have been targeted by people arranging sham weddings, often between illegal immigrants from Africa and EU nationals.
Couples had shown Mr Hills false passports and household bills to try to prove their address, and their entitlement to marry in the parish.
Four people were each sentenced to two years in prison last week, after admitting trying to dupe Mr Hills into marrying them using forged paperwork.
Hmmm. Are there only fake brides, as the headline suggests, or are there fake grooms too?
More seriously, as an American, I admit that I find it simply inconceivable and even downright ridiculous that CoE clergy in charge of parishes are legally prohibited from refusing to marry anyone resident in their geographical cure, even if the couple make no pretense of being Christians, much less Anglicans.
That sounds like a great reason for disestablishment to me. But far worse is the ludicrous and intolerable requirement that incumbents/vicars of English churches are forbidden to deny anyone (or their children) baptism, even if they openly admit they aren’t believers or have no intention of raising their children as Christians. That is utterly scandalous and totally unacceptable to me. Which is one of the main reasons why I myself could never in good conscience serve as a parish priest in the CoE as long as it remains an established church.
But in fairness I hasten to add that the only thing worse than a state church is an ex-state church that still imagines itself to be a state church (like much of TEC), or still acts like one since it simply can’t conceive of any other way of operating.
David Handy+
Passionate advocate of confrontational, Christ-against-culture, post-Christendom style Anglicanism for the 3rd millenium
David,
You should read Michael Saward’s autobiography, [i]A Faint Streak of Humility[/i]. Writing of his days as a curate in 1950s Croydon, he notes:
[i]The rude, superstitious paganism of working-class England in those days was horrific. Nowadays, it hardly exists because most young couples couldn’t care less and know almost nothing about the Christian faith. One result is that infant baptism nowadays is generally treated seriously by the small minority who request it. The blood of the martyrs, like Philip Wood, is the seed of the modern church. I’m glad to have been, all my life, someone who has fought for the principled use of infant baptism. I really do believe that the old indiscriminate and universal practice of infant baptism was the single greatest obstacle to the successful re-evangelization of England in the years since the Second World War. Why? If you believe you’ve been ‘done’ and are thus ‘a Christian’ what need can there be to respond to a challenge to ‘accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior?’[/i]
Wood, incidentally, performed his baptisms on Sundays and demanded that parents make some commitment to keeping their promises, and went so far as to refuse to baptize children whose elder siblings (whom he had baptized) had gone on to attend a Baptist Sunday school (perhaps a step too far). For such behavior he and his clerical subordinates were subjected to verbal and physical threats.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]