Crying in the chapel? Just worship at the altar of Elvis. Photograph: Robert J Moorhead/AP
It's bold, it's outrageous, it's an evensong of gospel music with an Elvis impersonator.
Only in the Church of England could a selection of gospel hits - Peace in the Valley, If I Can Dream and Swing Low Sweet Chariot - be a radical innovation. But the chapter of Truro Cathedral is committed to being "provocative and political" and to pursuing "a more exciting and radical agenda". In a "unique first" they're calling on the King of rock'n'roll to liven things up.
In a one-off show - sorry, service - on August 6, Johnny Cowling, runner-up in GMTV's 2001 Search for Elvis competition, will bring what he describes as the "spiritual" side of Elvis to the cathedral (you guess that the whole burger eating, pill-popping, groupie-fondling bit is out, then).
The Cathedral's Head of Worship, Canon Perran Gray, emphasizes Elvis's credentials as a card-carrying God-botherer, suggesting that the King's "Christian faith was very important to him".
"He was certainly no saint," adds Canon Gray, "but he was a believer."
His Catholic colleague Cardinal Carlo Furno may well be right that it is "better to have guitars on the altar and rock'n'roll masses than empty churches", as we reported a few weeks back, but what about the packaging?
There's nothing wrong with a little gospel music, but there's something a little suspect about one performer pretending to be another. Where will it end? Will the verger be dressing up as St Matthew? Will the Canon be dressing up as the Holy Ghost? Is the bread really going to do that magic bit? (Or maybe that's the other crowd.)
And you wonder who exactly they're trying to attract with an Elvis impersonator anyway, albeit an artist billed as "a well-known performer and entertainer on the pub and club circuit in Cornwall". Surely they can raise their game.
So which performer, dead or alive, would you like to see rocking in the cathedral aisles instead? Lapsed Catholics with Kabbalistic hang-ups and faux-religious monikers need not apply.
