ONE benefit of the switch to DAB is that I can listen to the BBC World Service while driving around the benefice. It was while driving to the World Service that I chanced upon James Coomarasamy interviewing the Bishop of Washington, the Rt Revd Mariann Edgar Budde, currently, the world’s highest profile Anglican prelate (News, 31 January), for Newshour (Tuesday of last week).
Coomarasamy pushed Budde several times to say that she was frightened by threats from Trumpites; she showed impressive maturity in refusing. It wasn’t fun being a hate figure for half of America, she allowed, but she wasn’t worried or in danger.
Budde lost composure only when Coomarasamy asked whether she was confident that the Church could be a unifier. A silence interrupted only by the occasional “Ummm” lasted a full eight seconds before Budde decided that the Church could be a unifier — on the ground, in small ways.
In many ways, the fracturing of American public life into mutually loathing camps was prefigured a generation ago in the Episcopal Church. There is an impressive modesty about Budde’s radio presence, but I did not detect any sign that she grasped to what extent the Left, both in the American polity and her own Church, had helped create this unhappy juncture.
Depressingly, the other high-profile Anglican cleric of the moment is the resigned Bishop of Liverpool, Dr Perumbalath (News, 31 January). “No senior bishop would discuss” the matter with Radio 4’s Sunday; so Julie Etchingham interviewed two priests and an MP.
The Shadow Minister for Safeguarding, Alicia Kearns, is a Tory Wet of the old school; I don’t know whether she’s “churchy”, but she showed an impressive grasp of the niceties of the relationship between the Established Church and Parliament. She would like a Royal Commission to tell the C of E how to get its safeguarding house in order, but acknowledged that “a very secular Parliament” might not wish to get involved, and certainly No. 10, under probably the least churchy Prime Minister in history, has already pushed back on her suggestion.
The Archdeacon of Liverpool, the Ven. Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, admitted to being in a diocese that was, understandably, full of “shock and sadness”. She favours modernising complaints procedures for bishops, but, as President Trump’s election shows, modernity is itself in crisis.
It was left to the Revd Dr Charlie Bell, Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and working forensic psychiatrist, to be the voice of the ordinary parish priest. He also seemed to put much faith in improved procedures; but surely a crucial question here is whether the existing procedures in appointing a bishop were actually followed. I absolute agree with Dr Bell, however, that “we all need to get off our moralising high horses,” and that a period of full disclosure would clear the air. After all, there is nothing hid which shall not be manifested.