My shamefully silent Church

Of course, none of this stopped the 40,000 England fans at Wembley on Tuesday evening. The popular “Ten German Bombers” might have been banned by the FA, but the fans sang it anyway. So too endless renditions of “Three Lions” and “Sweet Caroline”, without even a modicum of social distancing.

In church, however, the voice of praise has mostly fallen silent. Cowed by a desire to be overly compliant with every jot and title of Government instruction, Britain’s churches have come to resemble mausoleums. We’re advised that our worship must become an internal matter of the heart and that if singing is absolutely necessary, it must be conducted by a professional choir only.

But churches like mine don’t have the money for a professional choir. And I fail to see how the respiratory secretions of an amateur choir are any more dangerous than those of a professional one.

On Tuesday evening, after the match, I quietly celebrated Mass in church, without singing. While at prayer, we were being enthusiastically serenaded by the celebrations of a very different kind of communion in the pub over the road. I concede, given that our church was flattened by the Luftwaffe on the first night of the Blitz, I was not all that horrified at the thought of the RAF shooting down German bombers. No, the irritating thing about it was more visceral: others were allowed to sing while we were being silenced.

The leadership of the Church of England has been depressingly silent in defence of singing. I suspect they believe it is more Christian to sacrifice the worship of the Church for general public safety — perhaps an expression of their obsessive desire to be seen to be compliant with any and every expression of safeguarding without qualification. That is probably why the Bishop of Manchester recently suggested the real moral failure of Matt Hancock’s affair with his aide was one of non-compliance with social distancing regulations, rather than ruining two marriages.