'An obstinate public sinner'
Should clergy weaponise the sacraments to enforce church teaching on our politicians?
Hello! Our first story today is all about a Catholic priest who announced publicly the local MP, a regular congregant, could no longer receive communion because he voted in favour of the assisted suicide bill going through parliament. Is this egregious overreach and spiritual coercion by a minister, or a fair-enough response to an MP who claims to be a Christian but defies his own church’s moral teaching?
Then we return to Wales, to catch up on the latest revelations from Bangor Cathedral, further abuse scandals rumbling into view, and the perspective of the disgraced former archbishop Andy John, who has broken his silence.
We also have updates on last week’s story about the stalker in Leicester diocese (did she get a suspiciously positive reference from a bishop also embroiled in a bullying scandal?), and the latest on the Church of England’s ponderous search for its next Archbishop of Canterbury.
Finally, we look at the foundering gay blessings project in the C of E, now confirmed to remain leaderless to its supposed completion even as plans to consult among the dioceses fall to pieces as well.
Then there’s my latest podcast (what can we glean from the new pope’s choice of name and his illustrious predecessor as Pope Leo), and a lengthy list of links to interesting church news stories from around the web, including an excessively translated film, is the church prepared for war, the Nicene Creed in Old English, and much, much more.
‘An obstinate public sinner’
Should a priest be able to stop their local MP and congregant from receiving communion because of how they voted in parliament? This is no longer a hypothetical, after Lib Dem MP Chris Coghlan went public with his contretemps with his own priest following the assisted dying debate last month.
Coghlan is a Catholic and shortly before the bill came to the vote, he got an email from his local priest. The cleric, Ian Vane, warned Coghlan that if he voted in favour of the bill, he would be revealing himself to be an “obstinate public sinner” and complicit in a “murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded”. Given the church’s teaching and resolute opposition to assisted suicide, Vane continued, he would be unable to give Coghlan communion at Sunday mass to avoid causing “scandal in the church”.
Coghlan went ahead anyway and voted in favour of Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill, and as a result the following Sunday Vane publicly told the congregation the MP would be denied communion if he turned up (as it happens Coghlan wasn’t there). The Lib Dem is furious about what he characterises as an attempt to religiously coerce him into voting against his conscience.
“It is completely inappropriate,” Coghlan told The Observer. “It undermines the legitimacy of religious institutions in this country if representatives think it is acceptable to try to coerce members of parliament.” He went on to write in the same newspaper:
‘This pressure on me and my family did not deter me from voting with my conscience. Quite the reverse, in fact. But I know I am not alone among MPs with faith who faced the same pressure. One MP who is Christian told me she was “overwhelmed” by the strain it had placed on her.
It is my fervent hope that no MP succumbed to that pressure and either voted contrary to their own conscience or, perhaps more likely, abstained from voting at all to avoid the kind of consequences I have been subjected to. I hope not, but I cannot of course be sure.’
In the end, the bill passed with a much reduced majority of 23 (down from 55 at its second reading last year). Coghlan said he was worried the decline in support is not because of the growing concerns about the bill’s insufficient safeguards but because some MPs “succumbed to the completely inappropriate interference in democracy by religious authorities that I experienced”.
The Catholic authorities have attempted to distance themselves from Vane’s actions. The local diocese has put out a carefully crafted statement which reiterates the church’s opposition to assisted suicide, while recognising it was a “complex” issue and MPs faced a “difficult task”. Catholics were urged to privately write to their MPs asking them to vote against the bill, the diocese said, but pointedly did not address whether they backed Vane’s refusal to give Coghlan communion. The local bishop has offered to meet the MP to talk about it further.
Coghlan later said in a radio interview he’d met with the bishop who told him it was not the church’s policy to deny communion over things such as this. But this is not the first time some Catholics have talked about using the power of the sacraments to try to enforce doctrine upon more liberal-minded politicians. In the United States there have been various internal debates among bishops about whether to refuse to allow pro-abortion Catholic politicians to take communion (or even to excommunicate them entirely).
There has been no national policy per se, but in a few instances some priests or bishops have taken the issue into their own hands. Most famously, Joe Biden was refused communion when he attended a Catholic church in South Carolina in 2019 while running for president. But his hometown parish priest in Delaware said he would be happy to give communion to the lifelong Catholic.
Outside of America it’s rarer, although there have been a handful of instances in Ireland and other parts of Catholic Europe. The issue last reared its head in the UK in 2014 when the then Bishop of Portsmouth gave an interview to a conservative Catholic news site suggesting that politicians who vote in favour of same-sex marriage were no longer in communion with the church and therefore should not receive the host.
In response, the Catholic bishops conference insisted their colleague was freelancing and there were “no plans by any bishops in England and Wales” to deny communion to MPs who voted for same-sex marriage. This approach has also been taken by the Vatican itself. When dragged into the debate by another round of arguing among US bishops in 2021, one official said the Vatican did not want to use “access to the Eucharist as a political weapon”.
Those who do argue for the practice often point to Canon 915, which is part of the church’s law code. It reads:
‘Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.’
This is where Vane was getting the, admittedly inflammatory, language of Coghlan being an “obstinate public sinner” from. The debate comes in identifying what counts exactly as “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin”.
Coghlan has come out strongly against not just the idea that the clergy should withhold the sacraments from politicians who breach Catholic teaching. He’s gone further and said his Catholicism does not, indeed should not, have any bearing on how he acts as a politician. His article in the Observer begins like this:
‘I am a member of parliament. I am also a Roman Catholic. One is my professional role, which I am proud to uphold so long as my constituents support me at the ballot box. The other is my personal faith, which is profoundly important to me but which does not – and will not – have any relevance to my parliamentary responsibilities.’
The MP cites the famous example of John F Kennedy, who was the first Catholic to run for president in the United States. There was a lot of hysteria at the time, whipped up by evangelical and Protestant voices, that Catholics could not be trusted with high office. They have to do what the church or Vatican tell them, they are beholden to a foreign power, went the obviously sectarian argument. Frankly, given Catholics in the US were largely immigrants or descended from immigrants, it was also a thin veneer on top of some old-fashioned xenophobia too.
Kennedy had to work hard to persuade the voters he was an independent thinker, and that the Pope would not be able to coerce him with threats of eternal damnation to act for the church’s interests over the nation’s. It all sounds bizarre to 21st century ears, but it was a real thing in the 1950s and 60s. Kennedy famously said he was not running as the “Catholic candidate” but the Democratic Party’s candidate, and Coghlan insists he is not “the Catholic MP for Dorking and Horley [but] the Liberal Democrat MP for Dorking and Horley”.
But there’s a bit of a bait and switch here. I don’t think very many Christians, if any, want politicians to act as functionaries of their church (another reason to get rid of the bishops from the House of Lords), simply voting according to diktats from the hierarchy. But Coghlan goes bizarrely too far in the other direction by suggesting his faith should have no impact on his politics.
He draws the infamous private-public divide: faith is personal, private, for the home and church, while politics is for the public square. Don’t let the two mix. But this is an utterly facile representation of how religion, and frankly human beings, work. Of course an MP’s religious faith will, and should, influence how they vote. We don’t want MPs to switch off their beliefs, experiences and values derived from anything else, so why should their faith be kept in a hermetically-sealed box?
Coghlan has even said that religious MPs should be forced to declare their affiliation before discussing life issues in parliament such as abortion or euthanasia, likening it to the declarations of conflicts of interest when an MP owns shares in a company being debated:
“I think it’s a major problem for parliament in that we have this bill going through right now and the actions of Catholic parliamentarians could have a material impact on that.”
What?! Coghlan, himself ostensibly a Catholic, seems to be echoing the darkest conspiracy theories of those anti-Kennedy Protestants almost a century ago. Catholic politicians are not a secret fifth column for the Vatican, infiltrating our pure, secular halls of power to manipulate and steer votes the way the Pope tells them to. A religious belief is not a disqualifying conflict of interest when voting on an ethical conundrum. Everyone has a worldview, a set of values, a belief system. It might be derived from a religious conviction, it might be deeply atheistic, or it might be vaguely cobbled together without much thought based on passing whim and childhood influences (ahem). But nobody comes from nowhere. To exclude one class of worldview because it’s ‘religious’ is just bonkers.
Is someone who can say in all honesty their faith “does not – and will not – have any relevance to my parliamentary responsibilities” a person who has thought very deeply about what it actually means to be a Christian? Nobody can make windows into men’s souls and I have no idea what is going on in Coghlan’s heart, but I would venture to suggest his conception of being a believer is pretty distant from the average Christian.
He later expanded on his faith in this piece for Politics Home, talking about how he engaged more in his Catholicism after being inspired by a gap year trip to a mission in Mozambique:
‘But whether God exists or is simply the better part of ourselves is not something I felt the need to resolve. I was comfortable with the ambiguities of being a sometimes-agnostic Catholic, not agreeing with everything the church does, until this priest appeared to decide that my private religion was his public property. It was utterly disillusioning and quite whether I will be able continue as a Catholic only time will tell.’
This is a Christianity which is pretty shallow, held lightly at arms-length. It doesn’t seem to really grapple with the fact that choosing to follow Jesus is not a vibe, a vague set of values, an aesthetic you can slip on and off as you wish. It comes with associated commitments, it comes with a 2,000-year-old tradition. Jesus doesn’t call people to ‘Come and see what you think, dip in and out if you fancy it, see if this Christianity thing might dovetail with your own self-derived metaphysical worldview’. He says ‘Pick up your cross and follow me’. As Nick Spencer from the Theos thinktank put it in this interesting reflection on the story:
‘Don’t claim to be Catholic/ Christian/ religious if you’ve not given it much thought (or, worse, if you simply want your kids to go to a faith school). In this regard, the MP’s critics are right. Christianity has content. Your ‘pick and choose’, or worse ‘completely ignore’, strategy is a bit dishonest.’
As discussed in previous newsletters, the influence religion and churches can or should have in the assisted dying debate has been a surprisingly prominent part of the conversation on the Leadbeater bill. Coghlan seems to be demonstrating the same wide-eyed incredulity and irritation we got last autumn from others in the pro-euthanasia camp: how can these religious fundamentalists be allowed to speak into this debate?!
Yet, contrary to what Coghlan seems to think, religion has always been intimately fused into politics in this country. We literally have bishops with guaranteed seats in our legislature, voting on every bill that passes by. And as Theos’s Spencer notes, the row between the Lib Dem and his priest has strange echoes of recurrent spasms in the 19th century. Then, there were decades of debate over Catholicism and Nonconformists in parliament, which has originally only permitted Anglicans signed up to the state church as MPs. After centuries of suppression post-Reformation, in the 1800s the Catholic Church in Britain re-established its institutions and re-emerged into public view, all while non-Anglican Protestant sects like the Methodists, Quakers, Brethren and Baptists grew and grew. Could these folk be trusted with pulling the levers of power in parliament? Are Catholics intrinsically suspect because of their allegiance to a foreign power in Rome? What does it mean to vote your conscience? Can one’s conscience be formed outside of the influence of one’s church and religion?
In some ways, the endless and increasingly tedious debates we have today are ersatz versions of the more full-throated rows the Victorians had. We have uppity Catholic traditionalist priests trying to compel their backslidden MPs into upholding church teaching on end of life matters. A few years ago it was all about whether C of E bishops in the Lords were illegitimately using their privileged position to impose their woke lefty politics on the democratically-elected Conservative government of the day (i.e. some bishops said the Rwanda migrant scheme was immoral).
For all that some would try to shut them up, I suspect we will hear a fair bit more from Christians in parliament on both the assisted dying and decriminalisation of abortion bills. We covered before how the Bishop of London Sarah Mullally has signalled her objection to the Leadbeater bill, although she was more circumspect about decriminalisation. But others have not been, including the Bishop of Lancaster Jill Duff (admittedly, not a member of the House of Lords) who has written an article criticising the “normalisation” of abortion and sharing stories of women close to her who have been affected by the pills-by-post scheme. That said, unlike the more virgin territory of assisted dying, the abortion landscape is so familiar and the dividing lines so deeply ingrained, I suspect we won’t hear too much more from church leaders outside the Catholic world.
Putting all of that to one side, though, was what Vane, Coghlan’s priest, did right or wise? Do we want our priests, pastors and ministers to utilise their sacramental authority to try and impose church doctrine upon us? This is a more complicated, difficult issue. Some say it’s entirely consistent: if you sign up to belong to a church you implicitly sign up for the whole package deal. And if you refuse to live in line with the church’s teachings, you are liable to be disciplined.
There is theological rationale behind this, it’s not simply bullying from the pulpit. As this explainer from Premier Christianity notes, Catholics take very seriously both communion and Paul’s New Testament injunctions on how Christians must not receive communion lightly (largely found in 1 Cor 11). Catholicism has long held that those who persist in living outside church doctrine should not be given communion. Most famously this excludes the divorced and remarried, as the Catholic Church considers this to amount to adultery if your former spouse is still alive.
Receiving the body and blood of Jesus while living in sin would itself be to commit an even greater sin, so from their perspective the priest who withholds the sacraments is actually protecting his errant congregants from incurring further judgement from the Almighty. That said, as noted above, it tends to be only the more conservative flavours of Catholicism that really take this to its logical conclusion and try to exclude pro-abortion or euthanasia politicians from mass. Indeed, relaxing the prohibition on divorcees getting communion has been one of the biggest demands from liberal bishops for many years.
When it comes to Protestants, things are (as so often) a lot more fragmented and confused. But in very general terms, most Protestants hold the Lord’s Supper in slightly lower esteem than their Catholic cousins. They would be less likely to believe that receiving communion while persisting in sin is in itself an even graver sin. Most Anglican churches are quite relaxed about who receives Communion; many will not even check if you’re a baptised Anglican yourself but simply offer it to anyone who says they are a Christian. A more common flashpoint, especially for evangelical and conservative churches, is whether to allow congregants ‘living in sin’ (most commonly this affects gay partnered Christians) to take part in ministry or serve in various ways in church.
There will be a range of views on what Vane did. My own perspective, admittedly as a quite low church evangelical, leans towards disagreement with his approach. It’s perfectly valid and legitimate for a church leader to try and influence their MP towards voting a certain way, but I don’t think it’s right for them to begin weaponising their pastoral ministry. Receiving communion seems to me to be a fundamental part of how we all, as followers of Jesus, commune (see what I did there) with God and each other. It’s not a privilege, a reward for those good at sticking to the holy path, but a right and a duty of all Christians including those of us who might be struggling to pick up our crosses and follow in Christ’s footsteps. I don’t think it should be withheld, or even can be withheld (I’m unconvinced personally that only the ordained have the right to do it, but that’s a debate for another day). I think we should largely leave resolving ‘obstinate public sin’ to the sinner, their conscience and their God.
The Seven Last Shots of Christ
Time for another catch-up with the crisis-stricken in Church in Wales. The BBC have been investigating Bangor Cathedral further despite the scandal already forcing the Archbishop of Wales Andy John to resign. They’ve turned up more evidence of something mentioned in both the church’s own inquiries - excessive alcohol consumption as part of the cathedral’s culture and services.
Perhaps most shockingly, the BBC report some clergy and choristers from the cathedral did a drinking game called the “seven last shots of Christ” on Good Friday (a incredibly poor taste pun on the seven last words of Jesus on the cross which often feature during Good Friday services). They also report claims several people were sexually assaulted by someone after an Oktoberfest event at the cathedral in 2022 who had been heavily drinking. The alleged assailant was even in the training process to become a priest, although this was ended after the victims reported him to the church authorities.
Volunteers and choristers at the cathedral speak of prosecco and wine flowing freely even before services on Sunday morning, and heavy pressure to join in drinking sessions at official cathedral events and during trips overseas. Children in and around the choir would be exposed to not only binge drinking, but also crude sexualised jokes and innuendo, and as we already knew safeguarding training and DBS checks were an afterthought.
One singer at the cathedral, Esme Byrd, told the BBC:
“It felt a lot more like a badly run after school club rather than a professional organisation. It's not a sense of malevolence, but a huge sense of negligence and neglect and not following good practice. Creating the space where a malevolent actor could have done almost whatever they wanted.”
The BBC have also released a 30-minute documentary entitled Sins of the Church, which probes into how abuser priests and bishops were left unchecked to harm victims for decades across the Church in Wales. Former bishop Anthony Pierce, who pleaded guilty to child sexual offences earlier this year, is now being reinvestigated over further allegations, it has emerged.
The first reports about Pierce’s offending apparently reached the church as long ago as 1986, but almost nothing was done. Indeed, the opposite, as Pierce rose the ranks from hospital chaplain up to the Bench of Bishops. The church had previously admitted it had heard about allegations against Pierce in 1993 which were not passed on to the police for a further 17 years.
In a grimly inevitable turn of events, leaving Pierce in office led to more abuse. While Bishop of Swansea and Brecon, Pierce received complaints in 2003 about allegations of abuse from a cathedral choirmaster in his diocese who was said to have assaulted a 17-year-old girl. Predictably, there is no record of him doing anything about this, the BBC report. The victim said:
“Anthony Pierce did not abuse me, but he allowed my abuse to go unaccounted for and for my abuser to have many more opportunities to do the same thing. I don't know how many other people are without justice because Anthony Pierce stopped their case from moving forward - maybe to protect his friends, maybe to take the eyes off him.”
Finally, John himself has broken his silence, giving an interview to the BBC for the first time since his resignation. The former archbishop said his mental health had been hit by the firestorm of controversy, but insisted stepping down was the right thing for him and the Church in Wales.
His comments focused largely on what it felt like to be shoved out by your own senior colleagues. He said being in the now infamous Representative Body meeting (effectively the board of trustees of the whole church) where several figures said he had to go was “like being in a nightmare”:
“I know the people who were in that meeting. I don't think I had a chance to explain the changes we've made and how complicated things are, but having heard from them I don't want to be a problem for them either. I think it's a good decision for the future.”
He said he was largely unaware of the drinking issues at his own cathedral, and the financial mismanagement which has now been revealed. He also said he regretted not being more open with the media about what was going on, which seems positive. The biggest mistake, John said, was allowing himself to become distracted by his responsibilities as archbishop and losing sight of what was going on in his own Diocese of Bangor.
“It pains me that these things happened under my watch and I'll have to live with that. Bangor is a fantastic diocese. The damage done to the diocese, because I didn't pay enough attention to problems, is a burden I'll carry.
It's been very difficult to see what people are saying on social media. I'm a bishop and a leader in the church, these things have happened during my tenure, so it's only right to give someone else the opportunity to take responsibility for the future.”
No doubt there will be more to come out about scandal and dysfunction in the Church in Wales. Perhaps the church on that side of Offa’s Dyke is now going through the very public and very painful winnowing process their cousins in England went through this winter, as all the skeletons are dragged out of the closet all at once.
Purely from a strategic comms perspective, it might even be preferable to get all the bad news out of the way now while it can be at least partly placed on the shoulders of the now disgraced and departed John. That way, the new archbishop - when they take up the role at the end of the summer or early in the autumn - can have a bit more of a clean slate. The only problem with that? The next archbishop has to be one of the other five bishops, all of whom are at least partly embroiled in much of the church’s dysfunction themselves.
A questionable reference
We covered in detail last week the story of a rising star in the C of E’s Diocese of Leicester Venessa Pinto, whose career came crashing down after she was convicted of stalking and harrassing a church warden and would-be trainee vicar. Much of the ripples of that story relate to how poorly the diocese handled complaints made by Jay Hulme, Pinto’s main victim.
But another thread of the story relates to where Pinto came from. Before she was employed as a lay minister by Leicester to co-lead a church plant for 20s and 30s, she worked as a pioneer evangelist in the Diocese of Aberdeen & Orkney in the Scottish Episcopal Church.
The Times has reported that Pinto’s job there was funded independently (by the evangelist movement the Church Army) but she was licensed by the Bishop of Aberdeen & Orkney Anne Dyer. And they have quotes from the former vicar of the church where Pinto was based who found her, surprise surprise, to be a nightmare to work with.
When he complained about her, he was, again utterly inevitably, accused by Pinto of racist bullying. The paper added that two internal inquiries were held which mostly supported the vicar’s version of events. He, however, eventually quit the church over the stress of it all.
If the bishop’s name rings a bell, it’s because Dyer is herself neck-deep in her own bullying and toxic management scandal. As mentioned in several previous newsletters, Dyer has been in semi-open warfare with clergy in her own diocese and some of her fellow bishops for approaching five years now. The roots of the twisty tale are pretty complicated, but the upshot is that Dyer is stubbornly digging her heels in and refusing to resign despite her own boss’s demands and the damning conclusions of a church review into her case. Dyer insists this is all nonsense and an attempt by those hostile to her progressive pro-gay marriage credentials (and gender) to force her out of the diocese.
So it’s more than a little unfortunate that this bishop, credibly accused by dozens in her own diocese of bullying, was also in charge of another church officer who is accused of bullying by everyone she works with. The Times quotes an anonymous “Church of England insider” who claims Dyer effectively vouched for Pinto when she moved from Aberdeen down to Leicester. We heard last week that the Diocese of Leicester insist all the normal references were checked for Pinto before they brought her in. But the anonymous source said of this reference:
“Because there was no specific personal detail about Venessa, contact was made with the diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney. They were asked whether there were any concerns over her and we were told there was nothing to worry about. Bishop Anne effectively vouched for her and she got the job in Leicester.”
But the diocese dispute this. Their statement says Pinto was never directly employed or managed by the diocese, and any complaints made against her were investigated and dealt with by the Church Army. Therefore, the diocese and Dyer had no “awareness of the details of these proceedings, so could not have provided this information to the Diocese of Leicester”. The suggestion Dyer was ignorant of the row is again disputed by several people quoted by The Times, who say that Pinto regularly called up Dyer directly to discuss the complaints against her and to garner her support.
Meanwhile, another Pinto victim Kat Gibson and her husband Ben have released a lengthy statement after the publication of the BBC investigation into Pinto. In it she praises the Bishop of Leicester Martyn Snow for looking after her, including offering paid-for counselling, time off and other support:
“We felt that Bishop Martyn genuinely cared and wanted to improve things, and that out of the several parties implicated in the situation he was the only one to take personal responsibility for his part in it or to offer an apology.”
But they are critical of others in the diocese for their lack of attention to the other victims of Pinto, and the fact that while Pinto was suspended Gibson was expected to carry on leading their church plant solo, which put enormous strain on her even as she was recovering from Pinto’s harassment and abuse.
The Gibsons also criticise the now Bishop of Willesden Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy, who at the time was a senior leader in the Diocese of Leicester. They quote emails showing they had complained about Pinto to Nsenga-Ngoy as long ago as 2020, while the diocese’s account only begins with Hulme’s complaints in 2022. And the Gibsons reiterate their complaint that Nsenga-Ngoy failed escalate what they were telling him to his colleagues.
They also complain that the diocese gave a warm farewell to Pinto when she finally left, despite them at this point knowing for almost a year she was being investigated for criminal stalking:
‘The positive tone of the former statement felt like an extraordinary betrayal to us and everyone who had been affected by [Pinto’s] behaviours. It felt like we were all being gaslit and discredited, and like they were trying to cover up what had happened.
We felt very distressed about all of this, and still do to this day. We felt silenced by the Diocese, unable to speak up about our experiences or to warn others. We felt that Lusa had made serious failures in his handling of the situation but faced no accountability, and was rewarded by being made a bishop.
There are so many wonderful Anglican churches full of lovely people and communities. However, over the past few years it has been horrifying to realise how common and widespread it is for bullying and abusive behaviour to be mishandled and covered up in the Church of England.’
Trust the process
The ponderous search for the next Archbishop of Canterbury plods along. For those still gripped by the omnishambles of the Diocese of Canterbury’s Vacancy in See Committee, that was finally - at the fourth time of asking - legitimately elected back in May, and they have chosen their three reps to send on to the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) who will actually chose the next ABC.
So at last, we have the full membership of the CNC. You can read more about all 17 members here. The Canterbury Three completing the line-up are:
Sally-Ann Marks, a former local councillor with plenty of safeguarding experience who also led her family company as a director for 30 years.
Estella Last, a parish priest on the outskirts of Canterbury who has also worked as the diocese’s advisor on women’s ministry.
David Berry, a churchwarden in his parish who’s also a partner in a bigshot law firm in the City of London.
To be frank, I’ve not heard of any of them and couldn’t tell you where they sit on the dreaded question of pro or anti gay blessings. But hopefully that one topic won’t dominate the CNC’s discussions.
Last week I wrote a piece for The Tablet trying to sum up where the process for Welby’s successor had got to, and where it was leaving our increasingly fraught national church. But after I’d filed that, Lord Evans, the former head of MI5 who will chair the committee, has given a couple of interviews to try and dispel the cloud of rancour and mystery that has mostly surrounded the race to succeed Justin Welby.
His core message is that this isn’t like a normal bit of executive recruitment, it’s supposed to be a discernment process. Evans also has a pleasingly matter-of-fact approach to the whole thing, which is perhaps to be expected given it’s far from the weightiest responsibility he’s ever had as the person previously tasked with protecting Britain from terrorist attack. He told the Church Times he’d said yes to chairing the CNC basically out of a sense of obligation:
“From a duty point of view, I felt that it was the right thing to do, and so far it’s also been extremely interesting, and even, on occasions, joyful. [My role is to] help the commission to come to a common mind on the discernment of who we should be putting forward to the Prime Minister, enabling everybody to have their views heard and reflected.
[CNC members are not] delegates of their particular bit of the Church [but] there collectively to understand what God might be wanting from a new Archbishop. And we should be coming, therefore, with open minds.”
Evans revealed he had spoken to most of the diocesan bishops to garner their views, and defended the slow process compared to the Catholic conclave which got us a new pope in barely a fortnight:
“It’s a more open process, and it’s a more inclusive and consultative process.”
This is true, although the (somewhat questionable) openness we’ve had since Welby resigned is about to end, as the shutters come down. The CNC will meet at least twice over the summer before making its final decision in September. We won’t be told and will probably never find out what other names were in the frame, who was interviewed, why this frontrunner or that was rejected. Indeed, even the members of the CNC themselves in their locked room will not know how each other voted, given proposals to abolish the internal secret ballot were defeated at the synod earlier this year.
And then, at some point in the early autumn, these 17 men and women will stumble out blinking into the light to give the name they have landed on (assuming they can find anyone with two-thirds support) to the prime minister. And presuming Keir Starmer has no objections, he will hand on the name to the King, who will tell the world who the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury will be.
Going nowhere fast
A few weeks ago, the Bishop of Leicester Martyn Snow decided he’d had enough of trying to figure out a way through the C of E’s impasse over the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF, proposals for the blessing in church of gay couples). I predicted then that no replacement bishop would be found to step into the breach, and lo and behold, this has come to pass.
The latest update from the C of E confirms that a new lead bishop for the PLF will not be appointed, and instead the bishops already overseeing the project who sit on its ‘programme board’ will try to shepherd this cursed initiative over the line. These bishops who now are left holding the baby are the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, the Bishop of Sheffield Pete Wilcox, the interim Bishop of Liverpool Ruth Worsley, and the Bishop of Oxford Steven Croft. The board used to also have the Bishop of Stockport Sam Corley, but he stepped down in April due to diocesan commitments, and no replacement has yet been found. There are well over 100 bishops in the C of E, and three months on not one of them has been persuaded to step up. Even sitting on the one-step-removed committee vaguely overseeing the PLF is apparently not a job almost anyone wants to do.
Despite Snow’s resignation and the questions it may throw up, the timetable remains the same. The theologians are hard at work thinking deep thoughts about the bespoke/standalone services of blessing, the provision for conservatives, and whether gay vicars can be allowed to get married. The plan remains for the programme board bishops to finalise their proposals, once the theologians have reported back, in the autumn so they can be discussed by the wider House of Bishops in October. If these plans are passed by the rest of the bishops, they will be brought to synod in February next year.
As mentioned in the last newsletter on this, over the summer each diocese is supposed to be consulting its own local diocesan synods about the PLF plans. The C of E’s update notes that in some dioceses they have decided to pause this after Snow’s resignation. In almost impenetrable language they add:
‘When the diocesan consultations were first planned, the Programme Team were confident that the suggested framework for discussions would provide helpful insights. Responses from some dioceses that have already held their informal consultation identified challenges in holding these consistently.’
Reading between the lines, what I think they are saying is that sending round a web feedback form for all dioceses to do has not been quite so straightforward as they had hoped. It turns out asking dioceses to host informal discussions on the most divisive issue the church has seen for a generation has proven… challenging.
I’ve heard reports of quite testy exchanges when diocesan synods have broached the topic. We know that the Church of England Evangelical Council have been working hard to neuter any effort to talk about it, recommending specific questions for its supporters to ask of bishops and how they can avoid holding any indicative votes. The Church Times reports in some dioceses synod members have tried to pass procedural motions to prevent any discussion of the PLF at all, with some success. And in London, a majority of parishes said they would not opt into a scheme where they could be delegated a bishop who shares their convictions, deeming it insufficient for the scale of their objections to the PLF.
The idea that all of this angst, disagreement and confusion can be wrapped up in time for February’s synod meeting to rubberstamp the whole package feels increasingly optimistic. In fact, I might even say not just optimistic, but deluded.
The new Pope, Catholic Social Teaching and a second industrial revolution
In just his second day in the job, the new Pope Leo XIV dropped a fascinating hint as to what his priorities may be in the Vatican. It turns out he chose his name to honour the last Pope Leo XIII, who issued a famous and highly significant teaching document back in 1893. This not only laid out a new pro-worker approach from the Catholic Church at the height of the industrial revolution upending Western society, it also set the foundations of what has become Catholic Social Teaching. Now, the new Pope Leo has said the church’s social teaching may be needed for a fresh industrial revolution – one powered not by steam engines but artificial intelligence. To untangle what on earth he might mean, we are joined this week by Catholic theologian and Pope Leo XIII expert Luke Arredondo.
Quickfire
Bear Grylls, the TV personality and adventurer, has written a new book retelling the story of Jesus as a fast-paced thriller and it somehow landed at No.1 in the Sunday Times bestseller charts. Grylls said: “I’d give up every Everest summit, every Emmy, every book and TV show I have done to have written this.”
The most translated film in history, the 1979 classic life of Christ ‘Jesus’, has just notched up its 2,200th different language (Bouna, spoken in the Cote d’Ivoire). It’s all because of something called the Jesus Film Project, which has spent decades translating the film into every language it can think of as a means of evangelism. They’ve already got the Guinness World Record for most translated film (not a record you’d imagine is especially hotly contested) but keep on going.
The C of E’s General Synod (elected governing assembly) meets for its annual summer gathering in York today. The agenda is pretty bland, and in the absence of most of the flashpoint culture war stuff that interests the media, the main focus has been on discussions about how to get the church ready for war, of all things. An army brigadier will address members and the church’s bishop for the armed forces will talk about plans underway to ensure that vicars are ready to support the nation should the UK end up in a conflict in the near future.
I don’t normally bother mentioning the never-ending musical chairs of C of E bishops moving from job to job, but an interesting one last month was the promotion of the Bishop of Stepney Joanne Grenfell to become Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. Grenfell is high profile as the lead bishop for safeguarding, and as such was probably the only suffragan (junior) bishop who might have had an outside shot at becoming Archbishop of Canterbury. However, having just got her first diocesan (senior) bishop gig in Suffolk, you’d imagine that rules her out.
Drama at the Vatican after a leaked document appeared to suggest that most Catholic bishops did not support the late Pope Francis’s efforts to further restrict the traditional Latin Mass. Reforms made at the Vatican II council 60 years ago allowed churches to use their local tongue to conduct liturgy in, but some conservatives and traditionalists prefer the original Latin version. The dispute has become a bit of a proxy for the wider culture war between progressives and conservatives in the church. Francis issued rules in 2021 clamping down on use of the Latin Mass, but leaked documents show this was opposed by most bishops, posing the question what the new Pope Leo will decide to do.
BBC Radio 4’s numbers show More or Less has taken a good look at the claims made in the Quiet Revival, and examined the statistical basis for suggesting churchgoing has surged massively in recent years in Britain. Their broad conclusion, mostly drawing on data from the denominations themselves which we discussed in a previous newsletter and other surveys such as the gold-standard British Social Attitudes series, is scepticism about the Bible Society’s thesis. They also note that the charity’s starting point in their data, 2018, had slightly low churchgoing data compared to other sources, which makes the jump in 2024 more dramatic than it may actually be.
Terrible flash floods in Texas have killed over 100 people and left more missing and injured. One of the places worst hit was a Christian summer camp, which has been running next to the Guadalupe River for almost a century. This piece by Texas Public Radio explores the legacy and impact of Camp Mystic on many generations of Christian women, and what will happen to the storied place now.
The C of E is very excited about one of its most viral moments on social media ever. One of their junior staff posted a video on the church’s official Instagram of her reading the Nicene Creed (which has just marked its 1700th birthday) in Old English, dating back to a monk who wrote it down in 992. The video has been seen almost half a million times, and become one of the best-performing bits of #content the church has ever done. This has left the C of E’s Instagram account revelling in a 5,200% boost to its new follower stats.
Long-time readers will be aware of the bitter division in Ukraine between its two competing Orthodox Churches, one of which was historically subject to the church in Moscow, since the war began in 2022. Now, the government has stripped the patriarch who leads the historically Russian-aligned Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) of his citizenship, and accused him of supporting Russian policy and the virulently pro-war Moscow Patriarch Kirill. The UOC continues to insist it has cut ties with Moscow since the invasion and supports the Ukrainian people in their war against Russia.
A Catholic diocese in the United States has formally suspended the standard requirement for all Catholics to attend Mass, after congregants said they were afraid immigration agents would target churches to find unauthorised migrants for deportation. Rules which previously decreed sensitive locations including churches out of bounds for immigration raids were ripped up after Donald Trump took office, while he has also overseen an enormous expansion of deportation efforts striking fear across Hispanic communities in America.
A tragic story from Yorkshire, where a Christian who worked for an anti-poverty charity was senselessly killed after he got caught up in a vicious family feud. Chris Marriott, who worked for Christian outfit Jubilee+, rushed to the aid of a woman who’d been injured and knocked to the floor during a brawl between two families ahead of a wedding. But as he tended to the injured woman, another family member deliberately drove his car into the group in an effort to kill those from the rival family, but actually killing Marriott. His friends from church described him as a Good Samaritan whose faith in Jesus always drew him to try to help others.
A retired Anglican priest and activist has been arrested after publicly displaying support for the now banned group Palestine Action. Sue Parfitt, who has previous for getting into trouble with the law through her environmental protests, was arrested after holding signs saying ‘I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action’. Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation (making support of it illegal) after their activists broke into an RAF base to spray paint on a plane they claimed was somehow involved in Israel’s war on Gaza. Parfitt previously lost her licence from the Bishop of Bristol to do retirement ministry after she was arrested for her role in a Just Stop Oil protest which tried to damage the Magna Carta.
Feels like we’re getting more and more of these stories for some reason: a rural parish closely connected to the King has fallen into that favourite of tabloid sub-editors - an ‘unholy row’. The future of the choir at St Mary Magdalene, Sandringham, is apparently the locus of the dispute between the vicar and the congregation. The King, whose family normally worship there at Christmas, has been asked to mediate a resolution (which, obviously, isn’t going to happen but does give The Sun a reason to cover an otherwise dull parish row).
That’s it for this week. If you’re enjoying The Critical Friend and you want to support this kind of journalism, please consider first sharing it with a friend, and when you’ve done that come back here to upgrade to a paid subscription. It costs just £5 a month and really helps make writing the newsletter possible. It also gives you access to the comments, the archive and occasional bonus posts.