Beyond the Fringe

Today I feel thoroughly ashamed of myself.

A friend I hadn't heard from for ages sent me an email. After some awful experiences in his parish he's been bought off by his diocese and left the Church of England. He's joined the Celtic Orthodox Church, which I had to admit I'd never heard of. And this, I'm very sorry to say, sparked off one of my periodic fits of wandering around the internet delving into the murky world of fringe churches.

Now a walk around any large town will usually throw up any number of churches, some big, some small, in the Evangelical or Pentecostal ambit. Keeping themselves far more to themselves are fringe churches of a different order. Pick any of the words 'Catholic', 'Old', 'Orthodox', 'British', 'Liberal', 'Celtic' or 'Apostolic', and combine any number of them in any order, and you will, eventually, find a Church operating under that banner. There are dozens of them, usually composed mainly of bishops (if you have your own Church, the last thing you want to bother being is an ordinary layperson, isn't it? Not if you can be a bishop, or even an archbishop, and get to dress up) who are commonly very precise about who consecrated them as bishops and where their line of succession comes from, usually leading back to either the fraudulent Arnold Mathew or the deluded Jules Ferrete, and rather less precise about what they get up to day by day. My friend's Celtic Orthodox Church is actually one of the more respectable, because it does appear actually to have a couple of congregations and some genuine sense of continuity with something which is more than just a list of names of chaps who had hands laid on their heads by other chaps at some point in the past. I was very surprised to learn that the C.O.C. was once at one with the folk who now make up the British Orthodox Church, from whom they were estranged in 1997 when him what is now Mar Seraphim, the Archbishop of Glastonbury, led the majority of the Church into union with the Coptic Orthodox. The B.O.C. is very sensible indeed, and in fact makes a point of being sensible, as if to expunge the corporate memory of their origins in a bunch of Theosophists.

When I am in one of these reprehensible cycles of deluded fascination I almost always find myself straying in particular directions. One these involves hunting for a character who, when I was in Lamford, used to call himself the Abbot-Bishop of Hersham and whose name I can't remember, but who our organist once saw conduct a funeral at Woking Crem., bedecked in the most outrageous ecclesiastical garb which included ermine. He had some connection to the shadowy Order of Port Royal but he seems nowadays to have disappeared.

From there it's a short step to Bishop Jonathan Blake. He is now Presiding Archbishop of the Open Episcopal Church. Fr Jonathan came to public prominence when he married the unfortunate late Jade Goody to her partner, but I remember him (though have never met him) from twenty years ago when I lived in Chatham and he was an Anglican priest over the river Medway in Strood and was in the process of leaving the Church of England (with the bishop of Rochester's fulsome assistance) after being unable to keep his trousers on, an element in his spiritual progress he never talks about much. I remember you only had to mention his name to our Rector, Campbell, to watch him go episcopal purple from the neck up. Well, Fr Jonathan does seem to be very sincere about his ministry and his Church does actually seem to have a few members below the rank of Patriarch. And from Jonathan Blake we segue seamlessly in the direction of ...

... Bishop Sean Manchester. Like Mar Seraphim, Sean Manchester is also Archbishop of Glastonbury (there's a Roman Catholic one, too, it's a crowded place). You may have heard it said that most of the Internet consists of pornography or cat photographs. A good part of the rest of it is phantom blogs and websites set up by Sean Manchester and David Farrant under an assortment of assumed names to slag each other off. I'd never heard of Bp Manchester before reading a fascinating article in the Folklore magazine some years ago about the saga of the Highgate Vampire. That was when Mssrs Manchester and Farrant met and fell out, and they have devoted an impressive amount of the intervening forty years stalking and berating one another in no uncertain terms.  It's all quite entertaining, but you do feel like a good hot shower and rub down after reading any of the fake blogs operated by either gentleman. Bp Manchester stands out from the other episcopi vagantes - 'wandering bishops', that's the term for them - in that he is not an ecclesiastical and spiritual liberal, far from it, but prides himself on being more conservative than the Roman Catholics (except that he's married). I came across a very, very long thread on the Fortean Society message boards in which, during the course of several concurrent discussions about ecclesiastical niceties, whether vampires were real, and naturally, how evil David Farrant is, somebody asked a poster called Exorcistate (who was clearly Bp Manchester himself) whether the bishop did normal things like marry or baptise people, and whether he had a congregation. Well, said Exorcistate, His Grace has serious concerns about security and so his ministry has to be exercised with great discretion. You can take that as a No, then. Years ago Sean Manchester was interviewed for Udolpho, the magazine of the Gothic Society, in the course of which he claimed he was the heir of Lord Byron and therefore the legitimate owner of Newstead Abbey. He does seem to be quite intelligent and good-humoured. He is also the only person I have ever seen, bishop or otherwise, wearing a biretta with a suit.

Well, that's my penance done for wasting so much time on this grubby and unedifying world. Back to the grubby and unedifying world of the Church of England.

What amazes me, by the way, is that almost all these Churches seem to have a branch in Bournemouth ...