GOD be praised! The news came
in as I settled to write this column: another Ruth Gledhill article
has been saved for the nation. The appointment of Peter Hancock to
be Bishop of Bath & Wells means that Ruth can carry on into
next year publishing the news that Jeffrey John may become the
first (openly) gay (and civilly partnered) bishop in England. (The
bits in brackets are thought to be too complicated for the simple
readers of The Times.)
The most recent version
appeared on Monday, the day before today's announcement. "The
Church of England is on the brink of appointing its first gay
bishop.
"The Dean of St Albans,
Dr Jeffrey John, came within one vote of being recommended as the
new Bishop of Exeter,The Timeshas learnt. The successful candidate
to succeed the Right Rev Michael Langrish is to be announced
soon."
Until now, I had thought
that there was only one possible reason not to make John a bishop:
that he can give the impression that he can't think of any good
reason at all why he should not be one. But now I begin to hope
that he will be blackballed in perpetuity, so we can have the
pleasure of reading this article over and over, whenever the Crown
Nominations Commission meets.
Though, to be fair, if
her story is true, we have learned that the Commission is leaking
like a ruptured water balloon.
THE GUARDIAN
picked up a very fine story about US religion: in 2009, a
conservative Evangelical group put up a monument depicting
the Ten Commandments outside the statehouse in Oklahoma City. The
ACLU is suing to have it removed, as a breach of the boundary
between Church and State. I think myself that the idea of a wall
between the state and the sacred is absurd, and all that these
lawsuits really prove is that the US sacralises its own
constitution rather than the Bible, or any particular form of
Christianity.
But I have to applaud the
imagination of a group of Satanists in New York, who have now
petitioned to have their own monument put up next to the Ten
Commandments.
"Lucien Greaves, a
spokesman for the [Satanic] temple . . . said one potential design
involves a pentagram, a satanic symbol, while another is meant to
be an interactive display for children." This is what's known on
the internet as "trolling". You don't often see it done so well in
real life.
THE serious journalism
this week was once again in the Financial Times: a huge
investigation into the Vatican Bank. This contained one of the
most perfectly po-faced sentences I have ever read: "Suspicions
remain that the bank may have been a refuge for tax cheats from
Italy, which European officials admit has a problem with tax
evasion."
But the main line of the
story was fascinating, and new to me, at any rate. This was the way
in which the bank had been brought under control by international
regulators who, although they had no purchase within the Vatican,
had leverage over the "correspondent banks" - the normally
regulated ones that the Vatican Bank was trading with.
"Senior executives from
some correspondent banks . . . who spoke to the FT
reinforced what later emerged from reports by European officials on
the bank's workings. There were surprisingly few checks and
balances on cash flow - and far less documentation than expected. .
. As much as 25 per cent of the bank's business is done in cash - a
feature that regulators said raised red flags for money
laundering."
"We would say, 'We need
to answer the regulator on this matter.' They would say, 'We answer
to God,' says another manager at a large European bank."
Some of this informality
was deliberate: the article makes clear that the Bank was used by
Pope John Paul II to fund Solidarity and related organisations in
Poland, and now to help Christian groups in Cuba and Egypt. But
once the loose and opaque set-up needed for this was in place, the
criminals moved in.
The Bank of Italy struck
back. It pressured Deutsche Bank, whose Italian subsidiary ran the
cash machines in Vatican City, to close them down, since it would
be illegal to assist in the Vatican's breaches of international
banking rules. "Deutsche did what regulators had hoped it would. On
January 1 2013, a peak holiday time, there were no ATMs
functioning anywhere inside Vatican City. Lines of visitors to the
Sistine Chapel were unable to enter unless they paid in cash."
The Vatican got round
this by engaging a Swiss firm to run the cash machines, but by the
end of the story we learn that 25 per cent of the present staff of
the Vatican Bank are consultants from "a global risk-control
group", brought in to clean up the enterprise.