Dr Richard Clarke has questioned the wisdom of using commercial cinemas to distribute a short film prepared by the Church of England on the Lord’s Prayer.

The Archbishop of Armagh has questioned the wisdom of using commercial cinemas to distribute a short film on the Lord’s Prayer. In a statement released on 25 Nov 2015 the Most Rev. Richard Clarke stated that we need to be careful in the use of the Lord’s Prayer to “avoid becoming careless with it” and “using it without due care and attention simply because of our familiarity with it.” The Lord’s Prayer is used in “our public liturgies”, he observed, but for “very specific purposes and in very specific places. He was not sure if a cinema was an appropriate place for the Lord’s Prayer advertisement. However, the claims made by film distributors that screening the Church of England short film would lead to unrest was disingenuous. “There are plenty of other advertisements, in the cinema and on TV, which wilfully demean Christmas and hence the religious sensibilities of believing Christians.” Dr. Clarke noted the Lord’s Prayer “is a prayer that religious believers of almost any hue, may share in. It is a Christian prayer in that Christ taught it to us, but there is no reference to the Trinity or to the divinity of our Lord. It is based around the loving fatherhood of God and our relationship with Him and with the world around us. It is genuinely a prayer that those of other religions might pray without disrespect either to Christianity or to their own faith.”