| THE PAPERS are unusually theological this week. Or, at least, they are full of arguments about sin this week: what it is, and who is up to it.
Is, for example, the Bishop of St Davids, in Wales, the Rt Revd Carl Cooper, up to something with his press officer, the Revd Mandy Williams-Potter? The pair deny the allegation, but, unfortunately for them, dirty-bishop stories have a frisson denied to the ordinary dirty-vicar story, and this one was trampled all over by The Sun, the Express, the Mail, and
The Daily Telegraph, after the Bishop announced he was leaving his wife, and Mrs Williams-Potter announced that she was not leaving her husband, before clarifying this by explaining that she was.
We had the oleaginous letter from two ministers in the diocese to the Archbishop. It is not clear how the letter reached the press. Dr Will Strange, one of the organisers, told the Telegraph: “We are not making any allegations or claims or trying to cause trouble for the bishop.” If I were not trying to cause trouble, I wouldn’t circulate such a letter among all my colleagues for signature. It is so very easily misunderstood.
THE BISHOP’s troubles began when he took his communications officer to Uganda with him. The Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, had another story of an older man and a younger woman travelling around Africa in eyebrow-raising circumstances. This was an extraordinary account, by Stephen Robinson, of the late Bill Deedes’s love for his assistant Victoria Combe, who was more than 50 years younger than him when they met and started travelling around the world together for the paper.
I should say at once that Victoria Combe has been an admired friend of mine for years, and I simply cannot imagine her doing anything dishonourable. Lord Deedes, whom I, like everyone else in the newspaper world, admired and knew slightly, was also an honourable man.
He had been unhappily married for decades when he started to work with Victoria Combe, who is pretty, clever, and enthusiastic about life in a way not far short of naïvety. He would have been less than human not to fall in love with her, especially as he knew that he could trust her not to take advantage of this. His family would have been more than human not to resent it.
The result was a quiet tragedy of upper-class manners. In the end, Lady Deedes left her husband at the age of 82 to die of cancer, and, some years later, Victoria Combe, at Bill Deedes’s funeral, had to ask the priest to throw her flower into the grave after the family had all gone. She had smuggled it in, not as a wreath, but in a flower pot.
It would almost be easier to bear if anyone involved had actually behaved badly. But then we would be back to sin.
L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO had one of its rare stories of interest to the outside world, in the form of an interview with Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, described by Reuters as “the Vatican’s number-two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance”.
Bishop Girotti was asked for a list of modern sins, and came up with seven, predictably headed by embryo experimentation. But he also thought that it was wrong to pollute the environment, to make others poor, or to acquire excessive wealth.
This was, of course, taken up by everyone as an opportunity for a refreshing canter on their own hobby horses. By the time the story reached the Dallas Morning News, whose readers think global warming is a Leftie plot, the new deadly sins were headed by “drug abuse, and littering”.
THE REDUCTION of global warming to “littering” made me appreciate The Guardian’s tireless coverage of efforts by some American Christians to take the environment seriously.
The paper put on its front page a report that more than 40 Southern Baptists, among them a former president of the denomination, have signed a letter demanding that Churches take the problem seriously. This, despite the opinion of James Dobson that increased carbon-dioxide emissions are nothing to worry about, since they will benefit plants.
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