Church of England Ministry
Pitcher had undertaken training for ordained ministry in the Church of England and was ordained curate of St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, London - known as "the journalists' church". He is now Associate Priest at St Bride's. He has organised topical debates in church and a Christmas concert by Seventies supergroup Jethro Tull.
He occasionally attacks the conservative evangelical wing of the Church in print. He has also expressed concern about the entry of Anglican priests into the Catholic Church after the Holy Office accepted the creation of personal ordinariates for disaffected High Church traditionalists. He has been an outspoken opponent of the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in the UK.
He has also criticised the National Secular Society on the grounds that its website used language about "campaigning", "fighting" and that "it reads entirely like it is fighting a war to expunge religion from people's lives, even to make it something of which to be ashamed and contemptuous."
Read more about this topic: George Pitcher
Famous quotes containing the words church, england and/or ministry:
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (18381918)
“I see not much difference between ourselves & the Turks, save that we have foreskins and they none, that they have long dresses and we short, and that we talk much and they little. In England the vices in fashion are whoring & drinking, in Turkey, sodomy and smoking.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (17881824)
“The State has but one face for me: that of the police. To my eyes, all of the States ministries have this single face, and I cannot imagine the ministry of culture other than as the police of culture, with its prefect and commissioners.”
—Jean Dubuffet (19011985)