MOST appropriately Dame Sarah Mullally has chosen today, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Lady Day, for her enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury. We should notice that this Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dame of the British Empire, Peer of the Realm and ecclesiastical career bureaucrat has decided that it smacks of elitism to preserve the practice – dating back to AD 597 – of enthronement. Instead, Dame Sarah will merely be installed – which I’m afraid only makes me think of stairlifts and fitted kitchens.
We should offer our prayers for her, and she will certainly need them, given the deep hole into which the Church of England has dug itself. Only last Saturday, former Archbishop Rowan Williams wrote a long article in the Daily Telegraph in which he said: ‘I don’t know whether the Anglican Communion can survive.’
In fact, its break-up is already well on the way. The unsecularised churches of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) – whose members greatly outnumber those in England – have denounced the introduction of prayers in church for homosexual couples as ‘a schismatic development which breaks faith with those provinces who remain faithful to the historic faith’.
The most dramatic and significant aspect of GSFA’s response is that they have declared no confidence in the Archbishop of Canterbury and they no longer regard Canterbury as primus inter pares of the worldwide Anglican communion. They have looked elsewhere for believing bishops to be their fathers in God. GFSA people – many of whom are African – are serious, traditional Christians who suffer constant persecution by Muslims. These people have not responded positively to former Archbishop Rowan Williams’s admonishment, repeated by Justin (actually ‘Just out’) Welby that ‘the Church has a lot of catching up to do with secular morality’.
Mullallay inherits an unholy mess over these prayers for homosexual couples. With their usual cunning, the ruling bureaucracy who control the General Synod have decided to be undecided by leaving the matter in abeyance in the hope – which will surely be fulfilled – that the practice of saying church prayers for gay couples will be winked at, with the result that these will be weddings in all but name. That is certainly how such ceremonies will come to be regarded. Another case of de facto morphed into de jure.
Secondly, the Church’s safeguarding system has enlarged into a ubiquitous bureaucracy, an industry and a law unto itself. Along with all the clergy, I have had some personal experience of it. The Diocese of Chichester obliged me to waste five hours in a draughty church hall to be given tutorials on safeguarding by a very frightening female senior social worker who exuded an aura of omnipotence. The whole process is hedged with technical procedures, political correctness and hideous jargon. Its methods are the very opposite of all I have learned about pastoral care in 50 years as a parish priest.
The scandal is that its central doctrine always involves a bias against the truth. I received a nasty taste of this in one of those horrible tutorials. We were doing a case study concerning a woman’s report that she had been beaten up by her husband. We were all invited to say how we would respond. I inquired whether I might ask the woman if she was telling the truth. The omnipotent social worker turned red in the face:
‘No! You must never ask that question. The victim must always be believed.’
I replied: ‘But if she’s not telling the truth, she’s not a victim. She’s a liar.’
The new archbishop faces not just organisational but personal difficulties about safeguarding. A complainant has alleged that Mullally mishandled an abuse claim and argued she was ‘not fit for the job’.
And then Channel 4 News investigated a series of scandals under her leadership as Bishop of London, including the death of a priest and related failures. Additionally, a clergyman has accused Mullally of contravening the Clergy Discipline Measure by sending a confidential safeguarding email directly to the accused priest, outside the proper process. An independent investigation is pending.
I doubt that even one child has been saved from the machinations of molesters by the whole cosmetic rigmarole of safeguarding.
Thirdly, the Church of England has set up a £100million Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice to make financial reparations for its part in the transatlantic slave trade. Cui bono? Or in rough parlance, who will get the lolly since none of the slaves are still living? This scandalously promiscuous abuse of stewardship will result only in the enrichment of doubtful recipients instead of its cash being allocated to struggling parishes, most of them in working-class areas. Besides, for all the Church’s continuous breast-beating about the evils of slavery it never mentions that the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade was achieved by an Act of the British Parliament in 1833 and that it was the Royal Navy which policed the ban. The church’s propaganda never mentions either that there were – still are – active slavers among Muslims.
Fourthly, the Church is infested by excess bureaucracy. In addition to the 42 diocesan bishops there is a large – and variable – number of suffragan bishops. While the exact number fluctuates, the church now has dozens of suffragan bishops, far more than in the early 20th century. There have also been instituted spurious episcopal ranks and titles such as Bishop in Europe and lead bishops to oversee official responses to youth, racism, minority issues and climate change. Hilariously, there is also a ‘Bishop to the Archbishops’, presently the Rt Rev David Walker. In sum, today there are four times as many bishops as there were a hundred years ago when five times as many people attended church.
Fifthly, Mullally will preside over the continuing demise of the ancient parochial system. Three hundred Church of England parishes have closed in the last five years. This has been officially recognised by the Church Commissioners as the ‘fastest rate of closures since records began in 1960’.
Further, the Church Commissioners’ report suggests 368 parish churches will face closure in the next few years. The closing down of parish churches is being speeded by the Church’s irreligious obsession with the climate‑change hoax. It treats something referred to inanely as ‘climate action’ as a core part of the Christian mission and is committed to reaching Net Zero carbon by 2030 across all its buildings and operations. This includes churches, cathedrals, schools, clergy housing and landholdings. The burden on the struggling parishes is made heavier by the requirement to replace worn-out heating systems with the most expensive modern sorts. The authorities have decreed that this will involve ‘energy‑efficient heating and lighting upgrades, solar panels and renewable energy procurement, improved insulation and building management low‑carbon transport policies, carbon accounting and reporting across 31,000+ buildings’.
Parish treasurers are in despair while, of course, it is all dressed up in the usual pseudo-theological doublespeak as it is declared that ‘the church must strive to safeguard the integrity of creation’ which, being interpreted, means the application the most insane – and expensive – varieties of green paganism.
For example: ‘Training and resources for parishes, worship and teaching materials on creation care, public advocacy on environmental issues, support for community energy projects explicitly encouraged in the official Route Map including: land, nature, and biodiversity, stewardship of farmland, woodland, wetlands, and housing estates and ecological restoration as well as integrating environmental care into the mission of local communities.’
While they are scratching around for the money to pay for all this nincompoopery, hard-pressed parishes are obliged to pay thousands annually in the tax called the quota or the parish share. Pay up or be shut up.
The new Archbishop inherits a sentimental bien pensant attitude to illegal immigrants whom it falsely describes as asylum-seekers.
The modern clergy have been poorly educated, demythologised, politicised and infantilised. So Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan is only a tall story about how nice foreigners can be, and the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand is reduced to waffle about sharing a sort of socialist picnic. My friends accuse me of joking when I tell them about what the church has chucked out and the puerile alternatives put in place. I have space for only one example. In the Prayer Book’s Solemnisation of Matrimony, beautiful words refer to the marriage in St John’s gospel which Christ ‘adorned and beautified with his presence and first miracle that he wrought at Cana of Galilee’.
Unbelievably this is rendered in the Church’s new book Common Worship as: ‘Christ was a guest at a wedding.’
Only a guest, mind you, not the guest of honour. Gone the adorning and beautifying and, of course, gone is the miracle. Was there ever a clearer example of wine into water?
Finally, as is only to be expected of a hierarchy which has cast its family jewels – the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer – into the dustbin, the national church is going for the full Disneyfication. It has been decreed that the ancient cathedrals shall be resources where all faiths are welcomed and they should be ‘centres of diversity and fun places’.
A good start has been made by the recent commemoration of Eid at Bristol and the setting up of fairground roundabouts in several naves – the Moron Prize goes to the Dean and Chapter at Norwich where they set up a helter-skelter. Well might Euripides have said: ‘Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.’
