The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Moral Teachers

The Vicar of Downing Street held a coffee morning today for fifty organisations which he hopes to entrust with running our schools. They included Microsoft, an accountancy firm, and representatives from faith groups, and Tony took the opportunity to have a bit of a chat about the process of reform. "I know there will obviously be a lot of controversy," he said. "There always is when there is change. Any of you who have ever put through a change programme either in your business or in your organisation or your school knows that basically it's hell while it's happening."

Perhaps this is why some faith groups - notably a British minority cult headed by a Government appointee - find change so difficult. Credit where it's due, however: now that the twenty-first century is half a decade old, the Church at last feels able to consider stepping out of the nineteenth. Having largely opted out of the recent fashion for equal opportunities, the General Synod has now backed proposals which "could see women bishops brought in as early as 2012". The Archbishop of Canterbury said that "the status quo is not an option"; an adolescent spoke out against changing the status quo; and the Archbishop of Canterbury observed that "integrity need not mean absolute division". The debate, according to the Archdeacon of Lewisham, had a "profound theological significance". Between now and 2012, the Church will investigate the possibility of allowing parishes to opt out of the opt-out from the opt-out from the equal opportunity laws. It is easy to see why Tony believes that, once a change has been made, "afterwards people actually settle down and wonder what all the fuss was about".

In an equally thrilling development, the synod issued an apology for the Church's support for, and profit from, the slave trade, before the trade's official reinvention into what we now call "outsourcing". The motion for the apology was passed unanimously, but the synod "stopped short of endorsing a specific call for financial or other reparations". The Archbishop of Canterbury profundicised that "To speak here of repentance and apology is not words alone". By indulging in this atonement-free repentance-by-numbers, "we are actually discharging our responsibility to preach good news", the good news being, apparently, that Christian love means merely having to say you're sorry.

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