Errors of judgement

The Archbishop of Wales apologises properly, but is it all too little too late? Plus English conservatives get a helping hand from overseas

Hello! Our first story this week concerns the beleaguered Diocese and Cathedral of Bangor, in North Wales. Or, more accurately, the beleaguered Bishop of Bangor Andy John, who also happens to be the Archbishop of Wales. Can John save his job as anger grows across the church about the catastrophe he oversaw in Bangor?

Then we check in on what anti-gay blessings conservatives are up to in England. They claim to have found a way to get their trainee vicars ordained without having to work with the official bishops of the Church of England. Is this a lasting solution to the splits caused by the Prayers of Love and Faith?

And finally, what should we make of the new pope’s suggestion we are entering a second industrial revolution led by AI, and that Catholic Social Teaching might have some answers?

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Errors of judgement

Since we last covered the rumbling crisis in the diocese and cathedral of Bangor, in North Wales, a lot has happened. So much so that it seems the Archbishop of Wales Andy John (who’s also the Bishop of Bangor) is clinging on to his very job.

Before we get there, let’s catch up with the latest developments. We left it in May after two reports into the culture and finances of Bangor Cathedral had been published in limited, redacted form. Even what was published, though, left a bitter taste. Under the interim leadership of Sion Rhys Evans, a culture of bullying, toxic communications between staff, sexual promiscuity and excessive alcohol consumption festered.

Rhys Evans job-shared as acting dean while also being the diocesan secretary (effectively the chief executive) of the Diocese of Bangor, a remarkable situation for any dean. Even more remarkable was the fact that Rhys Evans had only just got ordained himself and was a year or two into his part-time curacy when he was suddenly elevated to running the most significant church in the diocese.

Rhys Evans was very much John’s protege, and it was John’s decision to both ordain him and then to make him the acting dean of the cathedral. And this decision has increasingly come back to bite the archbishop. Rhys Evans was suspended from both roles for almost a full year in 2024 without any explanation before being quietly shuffled off to a new job in December.

But on top of the two damning reports, we then learned that no less than six serious incident reports had been made to the Charity Commission by the cathedral in just the last 18 months. These related to things like safeguarding and financial record keeping. Leaked reports showed that money had been sloshing about between the diocese and cathedral while Rhys Evans was running both without any checks. The diocese’s funds had been used to buy cathedral furniture and send staff on overseas trips, which was now having to be repaid.

We ended the last update in Bangor with rumours of grumbling about John’s leadership and efforts to distance himself from the momentous mess piling up in his cathedral. This gathered steam later last month when two clergy worshipping and serving at the cathedral wrote a letter to the Church Times calling for a formal inquiry by the Church in Wales:

‘After the Visitation of Bangor Cathedral, recommendations were published, and a process of implementation was outlined. Being told to simply “move on” is, however, insufficient for many in the cathedral community. The claim of confidentiality has left too many legitimate questions unanswered.

The peace that Jesus brings is deeply rooted in confronting what is wrong, in putting things right, in restoring relationships, and in releasing the oppressed. There can be no peace without justice.’

Rumours were swirling around the church of efforts to press disciplinary proceedings against John, and some were even said to be thinking of going to the police, fearing that some of the safeguarding and financial problems at the cathedral might cross the line into criminal abuse or fraud. All new spending by the cathedral was then frozen while its debts to the diocese were worked out, we found out earlier in June.

All of this was still being fended off by John and the authorities until the start of this week, when it emerged the Representative Body (RB) of the church would be meeting to discuss the Bangor crisis. The RB, a partly-elected group of 20-odd people from across the church, holds the purse strings and acts as the trustee body for the whole denomination in effect.

And so, just before the RB met, a statement was published from John on the church’s website:

“This is an appropriate time for me to address the whole Church in Wales family regarding what they may have heard, and what has taken place, regarding the situation at Bangor Cathedral and Diocese. Firstly, I wish to apologise for errors of judgement I have made that have caused anxiety and hurt. My apology to you all is heartfelt, unreserved, and unequivocal.”

John goes on to reference the two reports he commissioned into the cathedral mess which revealed “shortcomings and poor practice”.

“I deeply regret that they happened under my episcopate and I recognize I ought to have done more to ensure such failings did not occur. I also take full responsibility that I did not address these matters quickly enough. I recognize our witness to Jesus Christ and our mission to Wales has been damaged and I repent and offer no excuses nor justifications. I am committed to an ongoing process of reflection to ensure these unacceptable events do not happen again.”

He ends by expressing his thanks for the support from the other six bishops in the church and for the national church bodies who are helping “re-establish proper governance arrangements” for both the cathedral and diocese.

The church also issued an update on work underway to fix things in Bangor, including implementing the various recommendations of the two reports. A new oversight board, chaired by Medwin Hughes (the chair of the RB), has been set up to, well, oversee this work. In a nod to the well-founded concerns about who is checking things are actually being done properly, Hughes said that his board would have full powers to inquire into any issue at both the diocese and cathedral “in order to build trust, accountability and resilience as we resolve these difficult issues”.

Also on Monday, a letter from the Charity Commission to the trustees of both the Diocese of Bangor and the cathedral arrived. I’m told it probed again into the murky financial transactions between the two bodies during the reign of Rhys Evans, and also inquired into what kind of reference was given when Rhys Evans took up his new job last year.

A new job, in fact, which he has already lost. Rhys Evans was appointed as the new bursar and general manage of Westminster College, a theological training institution of the United Reformed Church. But as of 19 May the college said he was no longer in post. “Canon Siôn Rhys Evans’s probationary period was unsuccessful, and the term was not extended,” they told the Church Times.

You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes here to join the dots. Clearly Westminster College had no idea about the detail of how Rhys Evans’ time in Bangor ended or the chaos and dysfunction he was leaving behind him. Once they found out, they, wisely, decided they could probably find a better person to run their accounts and manage a college full of young students. But given they didn’t know six months ago, what was in (or not in) the reference given by the Diocese of Bangor to the college when they hired him?

Even more troubling is the fact that at least some of the trustees of the cathedral and diocese don’t know, because they were not cut in on any of the discussions around moving Rhys Evans on. And yet it is they, as charity trustees, who are being rigorously quizzed by the regulator, the Charity Commission, on decisions they were not involved in but remain legally responsible for.

And so finally we arrive at the crunch RB meeting on Tuesday. I’m told their discussions went on for five hours as they worked through the almighty mess in Bangor. After ejecting John and any reps from Bangor during the discussion, the RB apparently increasingly turned on the embattled archbishop. Eventually they voted through an agreed statement which included language calling for some kind of change in leadership in the diocese.

Not an explicit demand John resign, but something fairly close to it nevertheless. And yet, despite this statement being voted through by a clear majority of the RB, it has yet to be published. All we’ve got so far on the church’s website is this fairly milquetoast holding statement:

‘The Representative Body of the Church in Wales met today to consider matters relating to Bangor Cathedral. After extensive and detailed discussions, the meeting has been adjourned, and a statement will be issued in due course.’

I asked the church why the statement has not yet been published, and all they would say is that “a statement will be made, but the exact timetable has not yet been confirmed”. And so we remain, for now, in limbo. Will the damning RB statement eventually see the light of day, piling yet more pressure on the embattled archbishop? Will John decide he’s lost too much support either way and resign voluntarily? Will the national church bodies decide to weigh in formally with their own investigation? Or can John hunker down and ride out this storm to save his archiepiscopate?

It’s all happening at quite an unfortunate time too. In the coming days the diocesan board of finance will gather to discuss how to respond to the stern inquiries of the Charity Commission, while John is supposed to be ordaining a new batch of vicars on Saturday. And the following week the recruitment process for the new dean of Bangor Cathedral rolls on with interviews scheduled for the shortlisted candidates. Interviews led by John himself.

A few final concluding thoughts. It is good that John has issued a more fulsome apology. One of the most concerning elements of this saga has been his attempts to distance himself from Rhys Evans and the mess at the cathedral, when ultimately his fingerprints were all over it. And so it is to his credit that he’s now made a deep and meaningful apology not just for his huge errors of judgement, but also for failing to address them for so long. As I’ve said before in The Critical Friend in relation to another archbishop’s mistakes - real apologies not fake non-apologies are relatively rare in public life so we should praise them when we see them.

But it also underlines the importance of getting out ahead of the story. If John in early 2024 (the point when Rhys Evans was suspended and presumably he started to realise how bad things had got at the cathedral) had come out in humility and openness to acknowledge the problems, I suspect his job would not be on the line. It’s of course never easy to fess up to making mistakes that have led to real hurt and financial catastrophe. But as so often, attempts to cover things up only make it worse in the long run. A salutary tale to other Christian leaders when they discover a scandal brewing: go public early rather than trying to brush things under the carpet. Or in starker terms from the Bible: Numbers 32:23.

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REACH for the stars

One of the many downstream impacts of the gay blessings farrago in the Church of England has been a turbocharging of connections between conservative evangelical Anglicans in England with their brethren overseas. The latest sign that anti-Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) churches continue to drift out of the C of E was an ordination service last month (but only reported this week).

An independent conservative Anglican bishop from South Africa came to a Baptist church in East London to ordain as deacon seven men. These seven men all came from C of E parishes but refused to pursue the standard ordination pathway (which ends in ordination by a serving bishop) in the church because they deem it corrupted by the PLF.

Readers may recall almost a year ago we discussed a ‘commissioning’ service also for seven men at the conservative evangelical megachurch St Helen’s, in central London. These were men who felt a call to ministry but would no longer pursue the official ordination route in the C of E in protest at the bishops’ stance on gay relationships. Instead, St Helen’s had come up with its own in-house version, complete with a selection panel and training course. In reality, it was a de facto ordination service as the seven men would go off to serve as all-but-name curates at their churches, including leading ersatz services of communion.

In the video which announced this, the pugnacious rector of St Helen’s, William Taylor, said that the seven would get properly ordained later on in a less public service. The identity of the seven men was obscured in the video and publicity last summer, and has also not been announced this time round either, but I think it is reasonable to assume they are the same people.

The only conclusion to draw from the St Helen’s service last year was that this was the beginning of conservative evangelicals building unilaterally what the bishops will not give them. Those from this wing who will brook no compromise on the PLF have been clear from day one - their price for staying in a church which blesses gay couples is to be given permanent legally separate structures. So their own bishops, their own synods, their own canon law and, crucially, total control of their own pipeline of priests, from selection to training to ordination to deployment. This idea is sometimes called in shorthand a third province. The C of E already has two, in the south and the north under the Archbishops of Canterbury and York; a third province would be a non-geographic entity set up for anti-PLF parishes to secede into.

The House of Bishops has zero interest in setting up this ‘church within a church’ structure to appease the anti-PLF faction, and so - led by the Alliance umbrella group and the Church of England Evangelical Council - the conservatives have started to create what they call a ‘de facto parallel province’. First they set up ‘overseers’ to act as de facto bishops for conservative clergy unwilling to work with their actual more liberal diocesan bishops.

Then, they began steering their own candidates for ministry away from the official discernment and ordination pipeline, and instead through their own selection panels and training courses (primarily the longstanding evangelical Cornhill course). These men (and with this constituency it is only ever men) were commissioned last year as we know.

But in Anglican theology, ordination is not something that can be done by anyone other than a bishop. And not just someone who has decided to call themselves a bishop. It needs to be a bishop who was themselves made a bishop by another bishop, who was made a bishop by another bishop, who was made bishop by another… you get the point. In theory you can trace this chain all the way back to those raised to leadership by Christ himself - hence the term ‘apostolic succession’. Now, the cynical (or historically literate) among us will recognise the extreme unlikelihood that there is actually an unbroken chain of episcopal succession dating back 2,000 years to the actual apostles, but let’s park that for now.

This theology of apostolic succession and episcopal ordination poses a tricky problem for Anglicans who breakaway from official denominations. Initially you’re OK if you bring some episcopally-ordained clergy with you, but how on earth can you raise up a new generation of priests without a bishop? Oh, let’s consecrate one of our existing clergy as a bishop, who can then start ordaining lay leaders as vicars. Except that you can’t make a new bishop unless you already have a bishop. Which you don’t. It can become a bit of a Catch-22.

The classic solution is to look overseas. You may not want to be tainted by ordination from the C of E’s bishops, but maybe there is someone in another Anglican church elsewhere unsullied by the heresy you are fleeing from at home? In the last 25 years as conservative evangelical Anglicans have gradually fallen out with their more liberal brothers and sisters over the issue of gay relationships, this is what they have done. As far as back the early 2000s there were sporadic examples of Anglican prelates (normally from the more conservative churches in Africa) popping over to the UK and US to ordain as priests those who were unwilling to get the magic hands from their actual local bishop.

Because overseas Anglican churches are in full communion with the C of E, this kind of ordination - even though it bypassed normal C of E pathways - is mostly recognised by the church. Priests ordained in other Anglican churches are moving to the UK and taking up jobs in parishes all the time. And so the fact you got ordained by a bishop from, say, Rwanda rather than Romford should make no difference to your future career path (formally, although it may mark you out as a potential troublemaker in the eyes of some dioceses and bishops).

Over time this expanded to include bishops from unofficial breakaway Anglican churches overseas too (as long as their bishops are also in the apostolic succession). Soon there became an entire network of irregular Anglican ordinations going on across England. This culminated in 2017 when the largest breakaway Anglican church here, the Anglican Mission in England, got one of its clergy consecrated as bishop by a bishop from another breakaway group, this time the Anglican Church in North America. This created an indigenous conservative Anglican-but-not-C-of-E bishop in England who then got on with ordaining priests outside the C of E to grow their movement.

And so, what the conservative evangelicals did last month was traipsing down a well-trodden path for that constituency. But, for now, they don’t want to leave the C of E. They want, in effect, to have their cake and eat it. To remain unsullied by the revisionist liberal bishops running the church and therefore get ordained by an outsider, but carry on ministering within the official C of E. So rather than getting Andy Lines, AMiE’s head bishop, to do the job, they invited in Martin Morrison.

Morrison is a bishop from the Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church in South Africa (REACH SA) and he came to London to ordain as deacons (the first stage, they will get ordained as priests a year later) the seven men mentioned above. REACH SA is an Anglican breakaway denomination with a few hundred parishes across southern Africa. It has a long history, which can ultimately be traced back to the formation of the official Anglican Church of Southern Africa in the second half of the 19th-century. Several evangelical parishes refused to be merged into this new body and so have lived as a parallel Anglican jurisdiction since. It has strong links with fellow (but official) conservative evangelical Anglicans in Sydney, who have helped REACH SA out with consecrating new bishops over the years.

And so now REACH SA look to return the favour, offering their own episcopal ordination to Anglicans in the UK estranged from their official bishops. These latest denominations are not the first time they have intervened in English church politics, ordaining conservatives as far back as 2005. Back in 2017 they went further and ordained a conservative evangelical vicar in Newcastle as a bishop.

The account we have of the ordination service last month was written by Andrew Atherstone, a church historian at Oxford who is also a part-time vicar and synod member. While happy to remain a C of E priest himself, he’s very well connected with conservative evangelicals who straddle the boundary between the official church and breakaway independent expressions of Anglicanism.

Atherstone reports that Morrison wrote a letter informing the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of York about his intentions to ordain the seven conservatives. They had approached REACH SA, he wrote, because they wanted to be ordained but “no clear or lasting pastoral provision has yet been made” for anti-PLF Anglicans. And so REACH SA had decided to step in and do the ordinations, “with the aim of sustaining and advancing faithful Anglican evangelical witness and to ensure we do not lose a generation of gifted gospel workers to ordained ministry.”

Because the seven men were getting ordained, technically, into REACH SA, they had to make all that denomination’s standard promises and oaths of obedience, although due to its Anglican heritage a lot of that is promising to uphold the C of E’s own Book of Common Prayer and Thirty-Nine Articles.

The letter informing the C of E authorities what they were up to is framed like a courtesy, setting up the ordination as nothing secret or untoward. Technically speaking, any overseas bishop who travels into the C of E’s jurisdiction is supposed to get permission from the local bishop before doing any formal ministry. But the clue is that Morrison’s letter arrived a day before the service itself. It was clearly timed to land on the desk of the unsuspecting hierarchy so close to the event that they wouldn’t have time to get their act together to try and stop it (if they had wanted to).

Indeed, the written response to Morrison from the Archbishop of York and Bishop of London didn’t come until the day after the ordinations had already taken place. It warned the REACH SA bishop that while his denomination’s clerical orders were recognised by the C of E, there was no guarantee the seven men could be given permission to minister as priests in the church. They also warned that using a C of E building to carry out these rogue ordinations could land that parish’s vicar in trouble as it’s also against the rules, but the conservatives are way ahead of them hence doing it in a Baptist church instead. The letter concludes:

“While we understand that you may feel you are responding to a pastoral need, the course of action you describe would not be a helpful act at a time when we are in the process of discernment in the Church of England. At the very least we would consider your proceeding in that way ecumenically discourteous. It could also be inflammatory and we consider it to be unnecessary. In the Church of England we are keen to keep all shades of Anglican church tradition valued and active within the Church, and are exploring how we can do that within our own Church.”

So, in the eyes of the C of E, these seven men (despite being English and working in official Anglican parishes) are ministers from an overseas church whose ordination is recognised, but not equivalent. If, for instance, you get ordained by an official Anglican church (say, the Anglican Church of Southern Africa) with whom the C of E is in full communion with, your clerical orders are equivalent to any locally ordained priest. But REACH SA falls into a different category: their orders are episcopal and so in theory valid, but not automatically transferred over. It requires the approval of the archbishop for such a minister to work as a priest. So, for now, the seven men cannot crack on with doing what is reserved for clergy - principally presiding at services of Communion and officiating at marriages.

It raises the question why go through this whole hoopla (further poisoning the admittedly already near-dead relations with your official bishops) when the seven cannot actually do anything with their newly-minted status as deacons? They were already commissioned lay workers at their parishes since last summer, preaching and pastoring in the role of de facto curates, so nothing has really changed.

Atherstone suggests it’s really not about the individual men concerned, but blazing a trail. For years now anti-PLF types have been banging on about the need for alternative pathways and separate structures. And now, this is starting to happen. There are, in the eyes of the conservative evangelical wing at least, seven men who have been successfully selected, trained and ordained without having to co-operate with the liberal hierarchy of the C of E. Nobody has (yet) had to break away from the church but they have broken through the logjam of evangelical ordinands who have refused to get officially ordained since 2023 when the PLF saga began. As Atherstone writes:

‘The first seven deacons have launched a grand experiment, designed to stress-test a prototype pipeline, not yet knowing what the ultimate result will be. They cannot boast a finished product, but they have made a bold beginning.’

He also notes that these rogue ordinations underline why the House of Bishops’ preferred solution to the PLF impasse won’t fly. They are offering Delegated Episcopal Ministry, whereby a pro-PLF bishop delegates their powers to a conservative bishop from elsewhere to oversee an anti-PLF vicar and parish. The Alliance et al have complained that this is too weak - that the new bishop, even if they are kosher and soundly conservative, only operates under the authority of the liberal diocesan bishop.

Indeed, a version of this has been in place in the C of E for over a decade now. Introduced after the women bishops settlement, the Bishop of Ebbsfleet (currently Rob Munro) serves as a non-geographic conservative evangelical bishop. Any parish unhappy with their bishops’ position on women’s ordination (and increasingly other issues too informally) can request they are put under Munro instead. St Helen’s themselves - the focal point and driving force of last month’s ordination service - have been having all episcopal ministry (including ordinations) done by this bishop since 2020. In other dioceses, I know of several ordinands who were selected and trained in the normal way, but when it came to ordination felt unable to have this done by their pro-PLF bishop. In most cases, an alternative conservative (but official) bishop was found from elsewhere informally.

So if there already are bona fide C of E bishops whose theological credentials are impeccably conservative who could do all your ordinations, why do you need anyone from REACH SA? The conservatives’ response seems to be that delegated ministry is not enough. Munro has to be invited in by the Bishop of London who legally oversees St Helen’s. Any actions he takes, including ordaining their ordinands, are done with powers delegated to him. In theory, at any time the Bishop of London could revoke Munro’s position.

And so the conservatives keep on insisting this isn’t robust enough, and perhaps that powers delegated by a heterodox false-teaching bishop (as they would see it) might themselves be corrupting and/or corrupted? Hence finding an entirely different and untainted source of episcopal leadership from REACH SA. It all gets a bit confused and confusing, if we’re honest.

As I noted in the newsletter after the commissioning last year, St Helen’s hasn’t really established a new pathway for anti-PLF clergy to get ordained in the C of E. First, these seven men are unable to do what priests do in the church, despite their diaconal ordination. If the sacraments are important to you (which admittedly for many conservative evangelicals they aren’t really) then what’s the point in having a vicar who, despite being validly ordained, cannot exercise the core function of presiding at the Eucharist in your C of E parish?

And secondly, the whole enterprise relies on the baked in wealth and status of St Helen’s. They have run this pathway at their own expense, pulling together selection panels, trying to replicate the lengthy and very detailed discernment process, sending their candidates off to training colleges (maybe even paying them a living allowance too?), and now employing them (I don’t know if they’re getting a house too, but that is standard for normal curates at least).

If you were to tot it up, the investment in each of the seven men will run well into the tens of thousands of pounds, and that’s before you commit to paying them the standard stipend (now running close to £35k) every year. Normally all that money is covered by your diocese, if you’re prepared to undergo the standard ordination track. How many anti-PLF churches can really afford to pursue this new pathway at their own expense, without a penny from their diocese? St Helen’s, with its massive congregation mostly made up of wealthy London businesspeople and lawyers, has the resources. But few others will.

Maybe the plan is for these half in-half out parishes to retain the money they normally give to their dioceses and use it to pay for this kind of stuff (which would otherwise be covered by the diocese). Certainly lots of churches including St Helen’s have spent years now withholding some or all of their parish share in protest at the PLF. But it’s risky, and won’t work for the very large number of parishes who are net beneficiaries rather than net contributors to diocesan coffers.

You suspect that even St Helen’s knows this is a patched together, slightly half-hearted solution. You suspect that they hope deep down that one day these seven men will get properly ordained by an actual C of E bishop, after a lasting deal is done with the hierarchy over the PLF. But that would rely on the bishops caving and giving the conservatives their church-within-a-church concession, which so far they have shown no sign of doing.

As with all the stuff done to tentatively build out this ‘de facto parallel province’, it’s all part of the brinkmanship and all part of the negotiation. Yes, we really mean it, the conservatives are saying. We’re not kidding. We cannot and will not collaborate with the House of Bishops over this. Give us our own structures, or we will walk. Look - we’re already halfway out the door!

The question is whether these kind of manoeuvres serve to strengthen their position or weaken it. Will the REACH SA ordination service convince the recalcitrant bishops to concede, or will it convince them that the conservatives are a lost cause so why bother giving them any more? Will it even, perhaps, radicalise the liberal wing by its brazen defiance of church rules? Who wants to make a grubby compromise settlement with people like this?

I think it’s at this point pretty likely that St Helen’s, and perhaps a handful of other large, well-established and wealthy conservative evangelical parishes, will end up leaving the C of E. They’ve been at loggerheads with their diocese and their bishops for decades now, and they have the gumption and the money to make things work on the outside by themselves. They’ve laid out their red lines, and the bishops continue to ignore them. It feels like it’s just a matter of time before Taylor and the other leaders of these churches have no choice but to follow through on their threats and walk out the door (although how many of their congregations will join them in this brave new world remains to be seen).

But what remains unknown is whether the panoply of smaller, ordinary, unknown conservative parishes will join them. Clearly St Helen’s could very easily go it alone as an independent church. But most of the others would find it much harder. They cannot select, train, ordain and even pay their own ministers. They may share the anti-PLF convictions of St Helen’s, but lack the deep, long-standing relationships with overseas conservative Anglican networks who can backfill in what is lost by leaving the C of E. They feel equally frustrated with their bishops, but will they be ready to leap into the unknown, leaving behind their building and vicar’s stipend to start something new?

St Helen’s hope that by creating this new pathway for anti-PLF ordinations they can encourage the other 90% of their constituency that it’s plausible to go it alone. Come on in, the water’s lovely, Taylor is effectively saying to his colleagues at smaller churches. We can still thrive and grow and minister while refusing the services of our bishops and dioceses. But whether they will believe him and leap in after him… I have my doubts.

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The other Leo

A fascinating sidebar to the new pope from last month was his name. Leo XIV is the first pope to choose Leo since, unsurprisingly, Leo XIII. Popes almost always choose their papal name to communicate something of what their papacy will be about. Francis chose Francis because a) no pope in 2,000 years had ever had that name before, underlining the novelty and freshness of his pontificate, and b) it honoured St Francis of Assisi. St Francis was, of course, famous for his love of the natural world and of humble service to the poor, both things the latter Francis intended to be hallmarks of his time at the Vatican.

Leo XIV has not gone quite so off-piste, but we now know a bit more about why he picked that name, and it’s really very interesting. Leo XIII served as pope from 1878 to 1903, at a time of immense social and economic upheaval. He also marked a significant shift from his predecessor, the long-serving Pius IX who was an authoritarian who formalised the doctrine of papal infallibility.

Leo XIII was a ‘prisoner of the Vatican’, unable to leave his palace due to a political conflict with the newly-established and unified Italian state, but ruled in a more consensual way, shifting focus from himself. He issued a dizzying number of encyclicals (papal teaching letters), most famously Rerum novarum in 1891.

This is hailed as the cornerstone of what coalesced as Catholic Social Teaching, and in particular addressed the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. A century of rapid development in technology and capitalism had turned Europe upside down. Millions of peasants had migrated to the cities to become workers, crammed into filthy slums and slaving away for a pittance in dangerous factories.

There was rising concern about the plight of the masses, and an alluring political solution in the form of socialism/communism, which was growing in popularity. Leo XIII, despite being cocooned in the Vatican, was aware of both the profound wealth being generated by industrialisation and the social problems surging in its wake.

It’s probably fair to say that if we had to guess, most of us would posit that the Victorian-era Catholic Church would land on the side of the bosses against the workers. The church had long been a reactionary force for traditionalism through the revolutionary upheaval in 19th-century Europe, and was close to many wealthy landowners.

But in Rerum novarum Pope Leo XIII offered a middle ground. He was highly critical of atheistic socialism and strongly defended the basic rights to private property which underpin the capitalist system. But he also attacked laissez-faire economics, the dominant theory at the time which led governments and companies to essentially ignore their workers/citizens in the belief that the free market would sort it all out best.

Leo XIII told bosses they had to pay their workers a just and fair wage, even if they were prepared to labour for something even lower. He said Christians have the right to join a trade union and collectively bargain for better pay and conditions. And that they must be given enough time off work to care for their families and worship God. He taught that employment at a factory should not be dead-end wage slavery, but a well-paid stepping stone which allowed the working class to save and one day become self-sufficient by starting their own businesses. He even suggested companies should engage in forms of profit-sharing or co-operatives with their employees.

At its core are fundamental tenets of what would become Catholic Social Teaching - the fundamental dignity of every human being, solidarity, subsidiarity, people as ends not means. The power of the state or the business curtailed to respect the little people.

Rerum novarum became hugely influential in Catholic thinking. And now, 122 years later, we have another Pope Leo. And this Leo has been quite explicit about why he picked that name. In just his second day as pope he gave an address to the cardinals who had just elected him:

“Pope Leo XIII, with the historic encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. Today, the Church offers to all her treasure of social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice, and labour.”

So the new Pope Leo is very clear: a second industrial revolution is underway and just like in the 19th-century, we need the Catholic Church’s social teaching to chart us a path through it. I find it intriguing he specifically mentions artificial intelligence too, especially as you’d imagine in these prepared remarks he’s not just riffing but laying out stuff that he thinks will be foundational to his pontificate.

Now, what Catholicism has to teach us about AI remains to be seen, but the pope is not the first to worry that our accelerating digital revolution may cause social upheaval on the scale of the first industrial revolution. Will AI and robots take away swathes of jobs, causing mass unemployment? Will it accentuate income inequality, as a few mega-corporations get unimaginably rich controlling the technology while the rest of us stagnate in poverty? Will AI render education pointless, as it becomes impossible to stop students cheating? Will AI undermine basic trust in the news media as faking videos, text and images becomes child’s play? Will there be a surge in populist anti-democratic politics in response to all of this? And what will all of this do to us as human beings, as image-bearers?

It seems inevitable, then, that Leo XIV will have to issue his own encyclical on AI and digital technology: a 21st-century Rerum novarum. What exactly is in it is impossible to predict, but I find the simple fact he’s signalling this as a focus of his pontificate quite encouraging. I’m not an AI booster and am quite sceptical of those predicting it will change everything, but we do want our church leaders to be engaged in this nonetheless.

Far too often the church is a slightly clueless passenger in social transformation. It is just as buffeted by cultural shifts as anyone else, never sees them coming, and often has very little to say about it until it’s far too late. So it’s refreshing to see a leader on the scale of the pope saying that Christianity has something to offer a society wrestling with massive epochal change. And that Catholic Social Teaching - with its focus on human dignity, solidarity, family life, political freedom, the common good and more - might be a good place to start thinking this stuff through.

I’ve no idea if the eventual encyclical which emerges from the Vatican will be a) any good and b) make a difference. But we do have a relatively recent example of how popes can shift the dial. In 2015 Francis issued Laudato si, his environmental encyclical. On one level it wasn’t revolutionary in its content, bemoaning the destruction of the natural world and climate change while criticising consumerism.

But I really think it helped push the climate and ecological issue forward. There was a moment in the mid 2010s when climate change pivoted from something we all knew was bad and probably should do something about, to something that was one of the most pressing and urgent concerns of the 21st-century. Obviously most of that shift was nothing to do with Francis or Laudato si, but maybe it was another straw that eventually broke down the camel’s back’s stubborn resistance.

It galvanised the church, including beyond the borders of Catholicism, and helped depoliticise the issue by grounding it in moral and human terms, rather than right or left. If our current technological revolution is heading towards a crisis even slightly comparable to the climate one, maybe another papal encyclical (and at least a pontificate focused on this issue) might help.

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Abortion decriminalised, part 1

Without basically any public debate or meaningful legislative scrutiny, MPs in parliament passed a major reform to Britain’s abortion laws last week. Decriminalisation now means mothers cannot be prosecuted for aborting their unborn children all the way up to birth. This radical change has caught many onlookers on the hop – where has this come from? What will it change in practice? Why is it happening? Wasn’t abortion already legal in England? This week we’re joined by Dawn McAvoy from the campaign group Both Lives to try and track the history of abortion policy in the UK and how we got to a point whereby the de facto legalisation of abortion on demand all the way up to 40 weeks could be rammed through parliament in less than an hour. We look at the changing scope of abortion law, the shifting justifications used whenever the law is changed, and how decriminalisation was effectively piloted in Northern Ireland over the heads of its own lawmakers to pave the way for last week’s reforms in England.

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Quickfire

• Some more churchy reaction to last week’s abortion decriminalisation vote. The Bishop of London Sarah Mullally, the C of E’s lead on healthcare, said it was right women were not prosecuted over abortions but warned the law would ‘inadvertently undermine the value of unborn life’. She also warned it would open women to coercion and abuse, and that such a momentous change shouldn’t be rammed through in an amendment to another bill.

• A group of 200 clergy, including eight bishops, have signed an open letter criticising the vote, which they said was a “dangerous change which we believe, far from protecting women, places pregnant women and unborn children at even greater risk of harm”. As politicians more “further away from the Christian moral values that have hitherto shaped much that is good in our national life” the voiceless vulnerable are being overlooked, they add.

• Meanwhile, the assisted suicide bill also passed last week is more strongly attacked by Mullally, who condemned it as “unworkable and unsafe”, as well as threatening our already underfunded palliative care services. As a member of the House of Lords, it will be interesting to see how big a role Mullally plays in trying to neuter or even toss out the bill as it is debated there.

• And the leading MP opponent of the bill, Conservative Danny Kruger, has posted an interesting thread on Twitter describing why he fought so hard against it. While in the chamber he rested on mostly secular arguments against, he said he was also profoundly disturbed by it on religious grounds too as a churchgoing Christian: “Support for assisted suicide is an article of faith - faith in the capacity of individual human beings to play the role of God, towards themselves and others.”

• And now for something completely different: A Congolese customs worker who was killed for refusing a bribe has been made a saint by the Catholic Church. Floribèrt Bwana Chui Bin Kositi was kidnapped and killed because he wouldn’t let a shipment of rancid rice cross the border from Rwanda despite being offered a bribe by the gang behind it.

• Thankfully, the brief war between Israel and Iran appears to be over (for now), but while it raged clergy in the region and the Iranian-born Bishop of Chelmsford called for peace and dialogue to avoid more civilian suffering.

• Is a wooden and moveable ‘Tiny Church’ part of the answer for Denmark’s declining Lutheran church?

• A small parish church in the centre of York is trying to put itself on the map as the ‘birthplace of lesbian marriage’. Holy Trinity hosted in 1834 a ‘marriage’ service between Anne Lister and Ann Walker, who we now know having read Lister’s extensive diaries were a couple. Obviously it wasn’t an actual Anglican wedding ceremony but they apparently shared Communion afterwards (as was traditional at the time for weddings), exchanged rings and made vows before the altar.

• We’ve discussed in previous newsletters the precarious situation of Syria’s Christian minority after the revolution last year which finally swept away the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. Sadly, there was on Sunday a suicide bombing at a church in the capital Damascus which killed 25 and wounded dozens more. The new government has blamed the remnants of jihadist group Isis and insisted the attack will not set back their efforts to build a new pluralistic Syria, but church authorities have demanded more protection.

• Every year the comms teams of the various C of E dioceses try to find interesting stories among those getting ordained in the summer. This year’s? A new curate who will minister at the Glastonbury Festival, which he describes as akin to a religious retreat where he feels closest to God.

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