Who will give us more of these troublesome priests?

LONG before Wales changed the law to make everyone an organ donor, unless they explicitly opted out, the outgoing Bishop of Wales campaigned to encourage people to sign up to the donation register.

His case was a simple one: that donating an organ was a simple act of Christian charity.

As he explained it once: “As Christians we believe that offering our organs and our blood to save lives is love in action and part of what it means to love our neighbours.

“So donating our organs as a gift goes to the heart of what it is to be a disciple of Jesus.

“That is why I carry a donor card and strongly urge as many people as possible to register online.”

And yet, when the Welsh Government was consulting over its proposals to change the law to one where the presumption is that people are willing to donate their organs after their death, Dr Barry Morgan opposed it passionately.

Despite the fact that lives would most likely be saved, he argued against it.

His reasons why are a crystal clear illustration of how the role the Church once played in our lives has been assumed by authorities that once preferred just to tax and conscript us.

They are also a guide to the role that spiritual leaders can still play in the lives of even those who don’t go to church.

Explaining his reasons for opposing the opt-out organ donation law in 2011, Dr Morgan said: “Organ donation surely ought to be a matter of gift and not of duty.

“Giving organs is the most generous act of self giving imaginable but it has to be a choice that is freely embraced, not something that the state assumes.

“Put more crudely, it can turn volunteers into conscripts.

“I think that compromises individual rights and freedoms and poses the moral question as to whether the state can make such decisions.”

From the public health messages that prompt us to eat our five a day and walk to work, to the complex tax system that tries to encourage us to save, pay into pensions and buy homes, the state now does what the church once did – trying to lead people to lead healthy (in the broadest possible sense) lives.

And I haven’t even gone into the role that commercial advertising plays in guiding our desires and understanding of ourselves.

Dr Morgan, who has served as Archbishop of Wales for 13 years and has been a bishop since 1992, was obviously not successful in his efforts to stop Wales changing the law around organ donation.

Maybe it is right that he wasn’t. After its long gestation, the law has only been in operation from December last year and yet the first figures suggest that dozens of lives have already been saved.

The figures published earlier this summer suggest that in the six months since December, 60 organs were donated – half of which were from donors whose consent had been assumed.

Those organs were taken from 31 people, 10 of whom had not explicitly signed up to the organ donation register.

Perhaps changing a presumption about our wishes on donation is not the great encroachment on our personal liberties that Dr Morgan feared.

And yet in taking on the state over it just as he has campaigned for more devolution and against austerity policies that hit the poorest, Dr Morgan has brought a dose of spirituality into our lives. In an era when most people don’t go to church, it is only by taking public stances and being active in the media that clergymen can today make their presence felt in the wider world. Extremists may do their work through YouTube videos, but those of a milder persuasion do not have that luxury. They must take their messages to us heathens and do battle with the temporal authorities that have usurped their pulpits.

I for one will continue to believe that we are all better off and richer as individuals and as a society when they are willing to do that.

Let’s hope that whoever succeeds Dr Barry Morgan as the Archbishop of Wales is willing to join the fray and have their say on matters that might once have been outside the jurisdiction of the Church – just as so many others are trampling on the topics that were once the preserve of men in long black tunics who preached to the congregations every week.