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The indignation of cowardly bishops over Cummings is bizarre

Of all the issues to speak up on out of conscience, they choose this?

I had almost forgotten that the Church of England had bishops. After all, here is a list of just of few of the moral issues on which they have remained mostly, if not entirely, silent: fornication, binge-drinking, social abortion, human embryo research, gay marriage, gluttony, knife crime and gang violence, blasphemy, usurious rates of interest charged by High Street banks on overdrafts. But it turns out that we do have some bishops after all, and they have rediscovered their zest for public preaching.   

What has suddenly inspired them to abandon their trappist silence on the issues of the day – indeed causing them to work themselves up into a state of righteous indignation? The case of a man and his wife who travelled 260 miles to secure care for their young child.

Gawd help Mary and Joseph had David Walker, the Bishop of Manchester, caught them scarpering off to Egypt during King Herod’s lockdown. “Unless very soon we see clear repentance, including the sacking of Cummings,” Walker tweeted on Sunday evening. “I no longer know how we can trust what ministers say sufficiently for the Church of England to work together with them on the pandemic.” So there, let the pestilence rip until the government’s chief adviser has been crucified.

Walker, though, was but a small voice in a very large ecclesiastical mob. Nick Baines, Bishop of Leeds, tweeted “do we accept being lied to, patronised and treated by a PM as mugs?”. Pete Broadbent, Bishop of Willesden – a post I am assured really does exist in spite of sounding like something out of Private Eye – claimed that “Johnson has gone the full Trump”.   

Is it really a good idea for a man of the cloth to be so politically partisan? Helen-Ann Hartley, Bishop of Ripon, tweeted too, accusing Johnson and Cummings of a  “misguided ideology of power that has total disregard for the most weak and vulnerable, and those who work to protect and care for us with relatively low pay”. 

Needless to say, those who would normally be outraged by the interference of the church in politics, and who condemn the very concept of the Lords Spiritual wielding power in our upper chamber of Parliament, were out cheering the bishops.   

I know Twitter brings out the worst in a lot of people, but I never quite expected the nation’s spiritual leaders to work themselves up into quite such a flap. Bishops have very occasionally caused controversy before, but it has usually been a result of a loose sentence or two worked into a long rambling speech – and which would have been lost amongst the platitudes had a snoozing reporter from the Church Times not woken up just in time. But not this time: the bishops were out-trolling the best. Next, the Bishop of Chipping Sodbury will be tweeting “you f***ing moron” at anyone who parks in his reserved place.

Perhaps they are missing their pulpits. I could be outraged by the bishops’ sudden outspokenness. But instead I am going to choose to be impressed. Now they have broken the ice I look forward to them expounding the Church’s teachings on the matters I listed at the beginning of this piece. What about those 200,000 abortions a year, Manchester? What about the 50 percent of births which now take place outside wedlock, Ripon? We are all ears.     

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