Monday 8 June 2020

Kneeling and washing the feet of the poor then and now

SHARE
I have always very much regretted the abolition of the old Catholic tradition of the English sovereign washing the feet of poor people on Maundy Thursday and distributing Maundy money. Dutch William attended one ceremony in 1698, but King James II and VII, England, Scotland and Ireland's last Catholic king, was the last to wash the feet of the poor.

I wonder if his son and grandsons did so in exile. His grandson Cardinal York (King Henry IX to Jacobites) touched for the King's evil (scrofula) in Rome.

Man is a creature born to believe, said Disraeli. Christianity is in steep decline even in the USA, but the new human rights religion caters for the same human needs. Here are whites washing the feet of black people in Cary, North Carolina.

LOGO


It was organised by the Legacy Church Center and followed a unity prayer walk, eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence to mark how long the policeman had his knee on George Floyd's neck and prayers for the country. 

The USA needs prayers, that's certain.

H.M. the Queen Elizabeth II distributes Maundy money each Maundy Thursday to the aged poor but I do wish she would kneel and wash their feet. It would not seem very Anglican, perhaps, but Queen Elizabeth I did it as well as her Catholic sister Queen Mary I.

15 comments:

  1. A Catholic bishop in Texas who kneeled with 12 other priests in a show of solidarity and prayer for George Floyd received a special call from Pope Francis on Wednesday

    Pope Francis calls El Paso bishop to thank him for anti-racism message

    https://elpasomatters.org/2020/06/03/pope-francis-calls-el-paso-bishop-to-thank-him-on-george-floyd-tribute/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Do you still think that Vigano's letter was a mistake?

      Delete
    2. Yes certainly - unconnected. I agree that bishops kneeling for worldly matters may seem strange but we English are used to people kneeling before the Queen to receive knighthoods.

      Delete
    3. Kneeling to the Chinese communists would be going too far even by recent Catholic standards.

      Delete
  2. Oh, Lord. Now I've seen it all. What does this have to do with equality? I would like someone to wash my butt, but I live in reality. I have to wash my own butt. That's what responsibility is about. All this feet washing is just a bunch of mentally unstable people all-too susceptible to the latest indoctrination-of-the-month.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh Lord. Now I've seen it all. What does all this foot washing have to do with real equality? I'd like someone to wash my Butt, but I have to live in reality. So, my Butt must wash itself. This has nothing to do with racial issues, and everything to do with how mentally unstable some people are to the latest Indoctrination-Session-of-the-Month. What's next people, Pol Pot dinner pot-luck with your wanton denunciations of close relatives? How utterly silly. I'm not having this.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Just in case you were in any doubt about what the UK’s state religion is:

    https://lockdownsceptics.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG_7408-827x1024.jpg

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The NHS and opposition to discrimination, entirely worldly matters.

      Delete
  5. THE Bishop of Bristol, the Rt Revd Vivienne Faull, has said that the city should “repent of the evils of our slave trading past”.

    Commenting on a video of the statue being pulled down by ropes and jumped on by protesters, she wrote: “The symbolism of this is profound. The old order is changing (and not just in Bristol).”

    Outside Leicester Cathedral, the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, was among those who knelt for eight minutes and 46 seconds on Monday morning — two weeks after the death of Mr Floyd.

    In February, Bishop Snow added an amendment to a General Synod motion which resulted in a public apology from the Church for its past racism (News, 11 February). He said on Monday: “I am deeply shocked by the appalling brutality we have seen against black people in America, and I stand alongside those who are suffering and peacefully calling for urgent change, as well as committing to make changes in our own lives and the institutions we are part of.”

    The Bishop of Loughborough, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, who has called for a public inquiry into the impact of Covid-19 on BAME communities, said:

    "We must stand up and share our abhorrence of that racist brutality, but also act in our own areas to address the culture of discrimination we live in this society, too.”

    The Bishop of Burnley, the Rt Revd Philip North, wrote in an article for the website ViaMedia “‘I can’t breathe’:

    “Long decades in which they have suffered on a daily basis from structural racism, inequality of opportunity and the denial of their personhood has exploded into a mighty welling up of anger which has left the Trump administration floundering and governments around the world struggling to keep up.”

    https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A man called Michael Wharton used to spin dystopian comic fantasies about all this including the Very Rev. Dr. Spacely-Trellis, “the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon” author of 'God the Humanist", worrying about things like lack of sex education. Nowadays as a satirist friend of mine said it is literally impossible to write satire. Anglican bishops were once in favour of hanging drawing and quartering Catholic saints and much more recently of the death penalty for sodomy. Now they have gone to the other extreme.

      Delete
    2. Philip North is an idiot but I would be untruthful if I did not admit that Catholic bishops are equally idiotic opining on politics. I feel England is ruled by the dullards I met at university.

      Delete
  6. Black Georgia State Trooper to Protesters: I Only Kneel for God

    https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/08/black-georgia-state-trooper-to-protesters-i-only-kneel-for-god/

    ReplyDelete
  7. Faced with a marauding mob, Britain goes down on one knee, and it’s not long before the other one is bent too. Looters and vandals are demanding mass genuflection as a gesture of surrender, and their demand is met with alacrity.

    This emphasises the mock-religious nature of woke demonstrations and remonstrations. By eliciting a ghastly caricature of a Christian ritual, the mob is extorting worship of their secular deities, not just tacit agreement.

    So-called liberals are Frankensteins observing with paternal pride the monster they have created. The monstrous sub-culture of resentment and discontent has been lovingly fostered for decades, as an essential prong of the ‘liberal’ attack on Western tradition.

    Now they are trying to conceal smug QED smiles, but the grins force their way onto their faces. Using brainwashed, dumbed-down masses as their weapons, the ‘liberals’ have shown how easy it has become to bring the West, including Britain, to its knees.

    Alexander Boot
    http://www.alexanderboot.com/10000000-proofs-its-not-black-lives-that-matter/

    ReplyDelete
  8. Tom Holland:

    Steeped in the language of intersectionality and postcolonial studies though the protests may be, the slogans derive ultimately from a much more venerable source. A dread of damnation, a yearning to be gathered into the ranks of the elect, a desperation to be cleansed of original sin, had long provided the surest and most fertile seedbed for the ideals of the American people. Repeatedly, over the course of their history, preachers had sought to awaken them to a sense of their guilt, and to offer them salvation. Now, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, there are summons to a similar awakening.

    As minorities mass on the banks of the Jordan to attempt yet again to ford the river, white liberals — often literally kneeling and raising their hands in prayer as they do so — confess their sins and beg for absolution. Only through repentance, their conveners preach, is there any prospect of obtaining salvation. The activists, however, are not merely addressing those gathered before them. Their gaze, as the gaze of preachers in America has always been, right from the very first voyages of the Puritans across the Atlantic to New England, is fixed on the world beyond. Their summons is to sinners everywhere — in London as in New York, in Amsterdam as in Los Angeles. Their ambition is to serve as a city on a hill.

    https://unherd.com/2020/06/america-is-the-greatest-story-ever-told/

    ReplyDelete
  9. James Bendell commented: Do they also get a pedicure?

    ReplyDelete