When a picture tells a thousand words
This picture was posted today by the "History Lovers Club" on twitter.
It shows the graves of a catholic woman and her protestant husband who the church authorities of the time (the late 19th century) in Roermond, the Netherlands, would not allow to be buried in the same graveyard.
As a man who is a member of the Church of England - which is a little difficult to categorise but would generally be considered Protestant if you had to put it on one side or the other - and who is married to a Roman Catholic woman of Irish descent, Ireland having suffered a far from trivial share of religious dogmatism, I find this moving and very sad.
Thank God most of society is moving on from that kind of cruelty.
It shows the graves of a catholic woman and her protestant husband who the church authorities of the time (the late 19th century) in Roermond, the Netherlands, would not allow to be buried in the same graveyard.
As a man who is a member of the Church of England - which is a little difficult to categorise but would generally be considered Protestant if you had to put it on one side or the other - and who is married to a Roman Catholic woman of Irish descent, Ireland having suffered a far from trivial share of religious dogmatism, I find this moving and very sad.
Thank God most of society is moving on from that kind of cruelty.
Comments
My wife and I were married in her familky's local Catholic church, and the priest who married us invited the vicar of my own Anglican chuch to assist and our Angligan church choir to sing at the wedding, and both invitations were accepted.
A couple of years later our twins were baptised in a joint Anglican and Catholic ceremony which was held at my local Church of England Church with a catholic priest saying the words and anglican priests assisting.
As a second generation inter-church family member - my father was Church of England, my mother was United Reform - my parents had very little difficulty with intolerance from the Anglican church and I have had none: we have never had any difficulty on the Catholic side either. Certainly no problems over funerals or burials.
So no, I don't agree that the Church of England is still like that today - thank God.
St Bridget's Church, Moresby
I have visited St Bridget's church in Moresby two or three times, once by invitation when they were holding an event for which it was appropriate to have wider community representation, once when a friend was being buried there, and I think I may have been to one other service there.
I'm not going to claim great familiarity with that church but they certainly struck me as friendly and welcoming and not as the sort of people who would dream of behaving in the way which let to the picture at the head of this thread.