POP GOES THE WEASEL
Usage and ab-usage
in the language of contemporary
Anglicanism
The Bishop of Sherwood, the Rt Revd Alan Morgan (BA, Lampeter), at the press conference launching the report Something to Celebrate, produced by the 'working party of the Board for Social Responsibility (of which he was chairperson), defended the beleaguered document with a curious claim. Before the end of the century, he said, four out of five couples will have 'cohabited' before (or instead of ) marriage.
How, the good bishop asked, could the Church of England erect barriers against eighty per cent of the population? A church that does so, he claimed, is on the way to becoming a SECT. This, said Clifford Longley, the doyen of the religious affairs correspondents, is emerging as the ultimate Anglican knock-down argument.
Bishop Morgan needs to be reminded of what a SECT really is. It is an association of Christians, apart from the apostolic
church, gathered in self-approbation r around a doctrine of its own invention .
...rather like the Church oF England