THE weekend was a milestone in the slow but apparently inevitable process of disestablishing the Church. It was bookended by two stories in which the gap between pretensions and powers, or written and unwritten rules, played a vital part.
I could spend the whole column on the Martyn Percy story; so I’ll give it two paragraphs. The journalistic lessons are simple: Dean Percy’s volunteer PR operation ran rings around the million-pound lawyers and Luther Pendragons employed to put the college’s case. Spin doctors derive their power from the ability to withhold or suppress stories, not push them out. In this instance, the existence of the spin doctors and the lawyers was a large part of the case against the Governing Body of Christ Church, and nothing that they could possibly say could undo the damage that they did by saying it.
You could describe the whole saga as a conflict between the written rules, which Dean Percy tried to establish and has applied, and the unwritten ones by which the college was actually governed. The letter of the statutes, and even of charity law, mattered very little to the spirit of the Governing Body — although, in this affair, of course, the spirit attempted to kill off Dean Percy, while the letter gave him life, and, in the end, a million quid and change. But, when the college statutes are rewritten, as they must be, the moral that most Fellows will draw is that the cathedral must be separated from the college. Disestablishment rolls onwards.
KAYA BURGESS’s scoop in The Times of a discussion document for the College of Bishops was a journalistic feat. No bishop has leaked the thing to me yet, but the extracts quoted are entirely in line with the spirit of those absurd PowerPoints that were circulating last year.
One of the things sketched out in the paper is a centralised management structure for the clergy, which only illustrates the rule that anything described as a “reform” must increase the number of people who need to fear their managers. Naturally, The Times led on the greatest absurdity, but the idea of a “Bishop for Brexit” is not that much of an outlier. The idea that there needs to be a Bishop for Having Opinions about stuff — especially about questions long ago settled for better or worse — is deeply ingrained in the imagination of the College of Bishops.
A couple of years ago, a leading church politician sounded off to me at length about how useless the Bishop to Prisons was. If this was a comment on a particular bishop, I have no thoughts. But the post itself does make sense for as long as there are bishops in the House of Lords. No one is going to know much more about prisons than the chaplains there, and some means of feeding their knowledge into the decision-making process cannot be bad. If you speak in the Lords, you may always be heard by someone who has given such large sums to the Conservative Party that ministers listen to them.
But, in general, the post of Bishop for Having Opinions should always remain unfulfilled, whatever the subject or merit of these opinions may be. The senior clergy are no longer part of the ruling class of this country, and they look ridiculous when they pretend to be.
Credit where it is due: as a way to shuffle out the nonentities into non-jobs, the proposal of a Bishop of Brexit and similar is quite clever. Alas, now that Jacob Rees-Mogg has been promoted to become Minister for Brexit Opportunities, the Church will never get the credit for the idea.
The trouble is that these non-jobs may never disappear, even after the need for them is done. In this, they rather resemble dioceses. The only really surprising thing in the paper was the claim that 27 of the 42 dioceses were running at a permanent loss. When I looked into this, the figure looked more like 41 out of 42, and I see from my notes that, in 2012, the two most subsidised dioceses were Chelmsford and Durham — entirely by coincidence the two from which were chosen the present Archbishops of Canterbury and York. They, at least, must understand the need for diocesan mergers.
NEXT week, the vicar’s wife who saved her family finances and her marriage by writing erotic fiction (her husband still doesn’t know). In the mean time, an American start-up is proposing to offer cremations as a web service, like every other kind of online shopping. If it works like every other online service, there’ll be messages to say, “I’m sorry, we could not fulfil your order for the ashes of your father; this delivery contains a substitute (gluten free).”
And The Guardian reported from Italy on the downfall of an Italian priest jailed for seven and a half years for extortion: “He was also convicted of assuming a false identity after masquerading as a judge when hiring male sex workers but acquitted on charges of extorting a nun, drug dealing and money laundering.”