The sound of Silence

Arow always makes a good story. Just think of Cain and Abel. And for as long as I can remember, the Church has, perhaps inadvertently, been offering up row after row for the national media.

First there was the row over women priests, then the Groundhog Day that has been gay clergy, and most recently their offspring, women bishops and gay marriage.

There’s a depressing familiarity to all of this. It makes you sigh as you write it. There were journalists both in shock and in tears at the vote concerning women bishops at General Synod. It must be depressing to read too.

It makes you wonder if anyone in Synod realizes that they’ve shot themselves in the foot so many times that soon walking again will be an impossibility.

So, you have to feel for the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Bishop Justin Welby, unpacking his bags at Lambeth Palace this week and wondering how on earth he’s going to stop the row-a-thon from continuing.

But he seems to have an acute sense of how to change the conversation, as spin-doctors might say, as reported in both The Times and The Daily Mail. In his farewell address as Bishop of Durham, Bishop Welby started by calling the government to account. The future in Britain, he said, is ‘pretty dark’ economically.

“We are seeing things we thought had disappeared in the Thirties,” he said, “not on remotely the same scale, but traces here and there.

“It is a huge challenge. Whether we go into a triple-dip [recession] or not, whatever does happen is going to go on being pretty dark economically.”

You’ve got to smile at this. In one deft, polite sideswipe, Welby sets the agenda, turning it away from the Church’s own internal rows to Church Typos Our next song is “Angels We Have Heard Get High.”