Seeing the Queen entering Westminster Abbey yesterday, with the Dean of Westminster, the Very Rev Dr John Hall at her side I realised that nearly half a millennium after the tragic decision made by Henry VIII, his* vision has at last come true: the monarch, for the first time I think, is the supreme Head of the Local Church. . Out of the pair entering the once Roman-Catholic Benedictine abbey, it was the Queen that looked like a steadfast spiritual guide for a spiritually wobbling prelate, a member of a spiritually wobbling church.
It has happend at the last moment too. Her church is overall confused, fallacy-prone, occasionally heretical, gravely split and bravely blundering further away from Rome and the Orthodoxy (one and the same thing). As it stands today, moments before the final fall, the Church of England cannot guide anyone anymore and it's this pious, simple, elderly and humble woman** that seems to be her Church’s last temporal guiding light***.
Westminster Abbey, yesterday. The Queen and ... irrelevant.
*or shall we rather say: the vision that the synapses in his brain had?
** Pius II (after Pius I, Queen Victoria) of the Church of England?
***probably pointing towards Rome; I may be wrong (it may surprise you: sometimes I am), but for a long time now I've had a suspicion that she's a crypto-Papist.
