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From Belfast-
The Anglican bishop of Baroness Thatcher's home town has described the scale and cost of her funeral as a "mistake" which may play into the hands of extremists.
The Bishop of Grantham, The Rt Revd Dr Tim Ellis, said the ceremonial event, costing up to £10 million, was "asking for trouble" amid divisions about the late prime minister's legacy.
In an interview with BBC Radio Lincolnshire, the bishop was asked whether the organisers of the funeral had "got it right" given criticism of its cost to the public purse.
Dr Ellis replied: "I personally don't think that they have. I think that in a context where there is manifestly great ill-feeling about her tenure and about her legacy, to then actually have a situation where we seem to be expecting the nation to glorify that with a £10 million funeral... I think any sensible person would say that that is asking for trouble.More here-
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/uk/bishop-fears-funeral-cost-mistake-29195273.html
From The Independent-
Officially, there will be no political eulogy at Baroness Thatcher's funeral. But when the Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Richard Chartres, clambers up to the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral to deliver the sermon on Wednesday, there will be some who will be holding their breath to see what he comes out with.
For although, on the face of it, Dr Chartres is an archetypal establishment figure – a friend of Prince Charles and member of the Privy Council – he is also a maverick and a man of strong beliefs, some of them quite at odds with those of the late prime minister. Indeed, his name first entered public consciousness thanks to an altercation with Lady Thatcher. In 1982, as a junior chaplain to the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, he wrote the controversial sermon for the Falklands thanksgiving service.
The thrust of it was that although war may be the lesser of two evils, it was always, in a sense, a failure. Runcie asked the congregation to pray for the dead of both sides and for Argentine, as well as British, mothers. The then Prime Minister was livid, and the sermon triggered a furious row between Downing Street and Lambeth Palace. Asked about the episode, in an interview in 2000, Chartres said he felt the decision was right, and that society requires triumphalism and hubris to be tempered.
More here-
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/margaret-thatchers-funeral-maverick-bishops-sermon-will-not-be-vetted-by-no-10-8572220.html
From The Telegraph-
Finkin Street Methodist chapel is quiet now: on its occasional Sunday services, 90 worshippers gather in a building built for 600.
For three years, the church was on the market, with the only potential buyer, a pizza chain, pulling out once it realised that the interiors were protected under its Grade II listed status.
But rewind to the Thirties and Finkin Street was a hub of activity, a thriving centre point for Grantham’s Wesleyan Methodist community. In the pews was a young Margaret Roberts, listening to her lay preacher father evangelise on the meaning of the Word.
Most people are aware that Baroness Thatcher was a product of a Methodist household and that her father was a lay preacher; most, however, probably think that Methodism was part of her childhood that dissipated later in life.
More here-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/9992424/Margaret-Thatcher-her-unswerving-faith-shaped-by-her-father.html
From The Church Times-
DURING her time in office, Margaret Thatcher's relations with the Church of England were often strained. When Robert Runcie was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1980, it began a decade in which the Church's was often the strongest opposition voice.
As a result, the right-wing press was highly critical. Lord Runcie told his biographer Humphrey Carpenter: "I remember Jim Prior used to say to me: 'It's not that she [Thatcher] initiated the attacks on you in the papers, but she could have called them off at a moment's notice'" (Robert Runcie: The reluctant archbishop (Hodder Headline, 1996).
The inner-city riots in 1981 began a debate about responsibility for the poor. This culminated in the report Faith in the City, published in 1985 by the Archbishop of Canterbury's Commission on Urban Priority Areas. This was described by an unnamed member of the Thatcher Cabinet - widely believed to have been Lord Tebbit - as "pure Marxist theology".
Earlier, Mrs Thatcher was said to have taken exception to the sermon preached by Archbishop Runcie at a service of thanksgiving for victory in the Falklands War, at St Paul's Cathedral, in 1982. Archbishop Runcie remembered the Argentinian dead, as well as the British, and said: "Those who dare to interpret God's will must never claim him as an asset for one nation or group rather than another."
More here-
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2013/12-april/news/uk/thatcher-clashed-with-church,-despite-her-faith
From The Economist-
IT IS hard to imagine a prime minister doing such a thing now, and even then it seemed rather surprising. In May 1988 Margaret Thatcher went to the General Assembly of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland and gave what would soon be called the Sermon on the Mound. It was an impassioned statement of a certain form of Christianity. The Conservative leader stressed individual salvation over social reform, the legitimacy of moneymaking when combined with altruism, and the “responsibility that comes with freedom and the supreme sacrifice of Christ”.
In religion, as in so much else, Mrs (later Lady) Thatcher was a bundle of paradoxes. She was the last British prime minister openly and emphatically to acknowledge the influence of Christianity on her thinking, in particular terms not fuzzy ones. Her fellow Tories, John Major and David Cameron, have presented themselves as loyal but lukewarm Anglicans. “I don’t pretend to understand all the complex parts of Christian theology,” Mr (later Sir John) Major once said, reassuringly. As for Labour’s leaders, Gordon Brown inherited the ethos but not the zeal of his father, a Presbyterian minister. Tony Blair is passionately religious but was famously discouraged by his advisers from “doing God” in public because of the fear that he might sound nutty.
More here-
http://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2013/04/religion-and-politics
From Belfast-
