the gathering forces of retribution finally materialised in the form of sheriffs and bailiffs and court orders … Spam’s Cranking up You know, spam Electronic junk mail. Maybe they think we’re turning into suckers, Christmas on the way. It’s importunate, it’s ugly, it’s of no interest, the people who perpetrate it are, without exception, swine … they’re talking about Harsh New Laws, but it doesn’t bother me

It should. Floods of spam pour down the line into my computer every time I collect my e-mail. You can picture the spammers: weaselly little losers, the sort who tell lies in their advertisements about how, just a year ago, they were on the verge of losing everything but now – now – they drive a this-sort-of-car, and live in a this-big-house and got to movie premieres with girls with tits-absolutely-this-big …

and part of it all is true.
The true part is the bit that, just a year ago, they were on the verge of losing everything. The untrue part is everything else, because they don’t mention the fact that, just under a year ago, they did lose everything .. The lurking functionaries knocked on the door … And after David Edwards’s compelling overview of two millennia, the “crisis” mentioned in the subtitle of The Roman Option seems more like a footnote to the attempts of all the churches worldwide to work out their relationship to Christ’s gospel, to each other, and – more urgently at least in the British context – to the society in which they operate.. While he praises the tenacity of Cardinal Basil Hume in brokering such a deal, known in church circles as the “Roman Option”, Oddie feels that more needs to be done to deal with the flood he anticipates.It is passionate, polemical stuff, but I feel that the Vatican will need a few more facts and a little less emotion to convince them to reconsider. Such a scenario, more dispassionate observers believe, is simply wishful thinking on Oddie’s part, part of an anxiety to have been in the vanguard of the major shift rather than one of a small band of dissidents at a particular point in history.Oddie’s book once again tells the story of when General Synod decided in November 1992 to ordain women.

It traces the special provisions made thus far by Rome to allow both dissident married convert Anglican clergymen to become Catholic priests despite Rome’s rule of celibacy, and traditionalist Anglican parishes to take the Pope’s shilling en masse. But Oddie’s principal purpose is to increase pressure on the Vatican to make preparations for the wholesale defection of Anglicans that will be prompted, he believes, when General Synod begins ordaining women as Bishops. A recent convert to Rome after a lifetime as a Church of England vicar, Oddie bubbles over with enthusiasm for the papacy as the standard-bearer of religious belief into the next millennium.Where Christianity: The First Two Thousand Years is evidently a labour of love by a scholar with a mission to popularise, The Roman Option is a piece of hastily-assembled journalism with a message. Oddie admits that events may soon overtake his book – indeed, pushing them along is part of his reason for writing it – but he believes that Christianity in the English-speaking world is at a watershed, with the Anglican communion – by ordaining women – having finally come off the fence and decided that it is a Protestant Church.It is a not a new theory, and those Catholic Anglicans who remain a dispirited but determined rump within the Church of England will disagree.

Indeed in general he seems little disturbed by the prospect of the privatisation of religion, though just occasionally you get a hint of his own feelings as when he summarises a fairly balanced pen portrait of Pope John Paul II with what reads, given what has gone before, rather like a despairing plea: “it may be thought that the history of the papacy as the centre of Christian unity in truthful faith and charitable holiness has a great future ahead of it.”William Oddie would certainly endorse such a sentiment, though he would remove the note of doubt that is detectable in Edwards’s voice. “For many who regard themselves as Christian as the 21st century begins, the option may be made for a fairly loose attachment to historic Christianity, questioning many of its doctrines and ignoring most of its rituals. The connection may be so loose that the person who makes it may be called with justice a ‘post-Christian’.”Such a verdict has been strenuously resisted by Bishops and Cardinals in recent decades as they have laboured in vain to corral the faithful behind certain dogmas and beliefs, but Edwards is not afraid to spell out the current ascendancy of the a la carte approach to Christianity over the old-fashioned table d’hote variety. And despite his own Anglican background – as Provost of Southwark Cathedral until his retirement in 1994 – Edwards has an eye for the broader picture.
This means that he makes the most of Anglicanism’s somewhat ambiguous position between the Protestant and Catholic traditions to immerse himself in both without any hint of partisanship or points-scoring.