Church of England leaders have accepted the need to be “hospitable” to other faiths within any future service at Westminster Abbey, in order to reflect the spiritual diversity of modern Britain.
The Church has resisted calls for a multi-faith service in recent years, preferring to stress that the Christian nature of the coronation is preserved by law.
Senior church figures told this newspaper that it was now accepted that other faiths should be recognised within the coronation service for the first time.
It will not, however, be a “multi-faith” service in the sense of a ceremony that treats all faiths as equal.
Read it all and there is more there.
The Church is right to resist attempts to turn this into a multi-faith service. But there was a change in the coronation liturgy at the Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953: the inclusion of the Moderator of the Church of Scotland in the liturgy (he presented the Bible to Elizabeth). Certainly not multifaith, so not a dramatic break, though it amounted to a recognition of the place of the established Church of Scotland (to which the sovereign belongs when in Scotland) within the kingdom in the context of the coronation liturgy.
[url=http://www.oremus.org/liturgy/coronation/cor1953b.html]The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II[/url]
It doesn’t matter. Britain will be a Muslim country within the next fifty years. The Queen will be Europe’s last explicitly Christian crowned sovereign unless the monarchy is restored in Serbia (possible) or Russia (unlikely, at least while uncle Vlady is running the shop).
God save The Queen and God save Europe!
Amen, Ad Orientem.