Conservative Anglicans – conservative anything, come to think of it – are rejoicing. Justin Welby, the woke Archbishop of Canterbury, has resigned not so much under a cloud as in the midst of a hurricane.
Yet I remember the old Eastern tale and weep (figuratively speaking). This is how it went.
A blood-thirsty tyrant dies, and people all over the land are dancing, laughing and singing merry songs. Only a very old woman sits on a tree stump crying.
A young passerby asks, “Why are you so sad? Aren’t you happy the tyrant is dead?” “Young man,” says the woman. “I’m so old that I’ve seen many tyrants come and go. And you know what? Each new tyrant is worse than his predecessor.”
Conservative Anglicans are happy to see the last of Welby because they hope he’ll be replaced by someone like Richard Hooker or Thomas Cranmer. It’s more likely, nay certain, that the new archbishop will be closer to Hewlett Johnson, ‘the Red Dean of Canterbury’.
Welby fell on his sword following the scandal involving John Smyth, a libidinous lawyer who industriously abused more than 100 youngsters at Christian camps. The physical and sexual abuse had started before Welby was even ordained and continued until Smyth died in 2018.
Since much of that fun happened on Welby’s watch, whether or not he knew is a moot point. He had to assume responsibility and resign. However, some things that happened during his tenure were much worse than his lackadaisical ignorance of detail, that proverbial residence of the devil.
Yet neither the government nor the Church hierarchy criticised Welby for those offences, much less demanded his resignation. This, though he has done his level best to run our established Church into the ground.
I often quote the Venerable Matteo Ricci, who almost succeeded in converting China in the 16th century. He encapsulated the inherently conservative nature of the Church by saying, Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus” (“We shall remain as we are or we shall not remain at all”). That adage ought to be inscribed on the portal of every church regardless of denomination.
It certainly wasn’t inscribed anywhere during Welby’s tenure. He did all he could to commit the Church of England to woke modernism at its leftmost.
Any religion must uphold eternal truths. Since such truths are by definition timeless, they must be impervious to the weathercock vicissitudes of social fashion. A church that strives to keep pace with secular modernity forfeits any claim to people’s allegiance.
People don’t go to church to extend their quotidian life. They go there to hold their quotidian life to higher eternal standards, find it wanting, repent, thank God for his forbearance and celebrate his glory.
When a church is barely distinguishable from social services and its message from that preached by woke media, it becomes superfluous. And people serve it a redundancy notice by staying away in droves.
That’s partly why some 3,000 Anglican churches closed on Welby’s watch, and many of those that still hang on are filled with empty pews. It would be churlish to put the whole blame at Welby’s feet. He was only a part of the problem, but he certainly was no part of a solution.
It wasn’t only lay parishioners who fled from the church but also hundreds of priests who defected to Roman Catholicism. Even Michael Nazir Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester who kindly wrote a preface for one of my books, left the church he had served with heroic distinction all his life.
Welby’s role model certainly wasn’t Matteo Ricci. It was Paula Vennells, the disgraced Post Office CEO and an ordained Anglican priest. Under her management over 900 postmasters were wrongly convicted, which led to the loss of jobs, bankruptcy, prison sentences and at least four suicides.
Vennells fought her corner to the last. Yet the inevitable happened: she was forced out of office, disgraced – and awarded a CBE for her work on “diversity and inclusion” as well as her “commitment to the social purpose at the heart of the business and her dedication in putting the customer first”.
Welby agreed wholeheartedly. Vennells, he said, “shaped my thinking over the years”. You don’t say.
He too heard Vox DEI in every tonal detail, even when it outshouted vox Dei. For example, Welby displayed a fanatical commitment to female episcopate and finally got his wish in the well-rounded shape of 24 freshly baked women bishops, each outdoing even him in their championship of wokery. If the Church of England had ever had a claim to apostolic succession, it was thereby expunged.
Nor was Welby shy in letting his views known on secular matters as well. A zealous Remainer, he regarded the EU as the greatest achievement of Christendom since the fall of the Roman Empire. That former oil trader also happily bit the hand that had fed him so well for so long by acting as Greta Thunberg’s disciple. “God,” he said, “was Green”.
I don’t know how closely the deity has analysed the data on global warming. Not very, would be my guess. Being omniscient He’d otherwise instantly see it for the woke scam it is, and one used as a stake aimed at the heart of the civilisation that used to be called Christian and now barely merits Western.
More to the point, Welby certainly never analysed it either. He simply reacted in a kneejerk fashion to the woke glossolalia reverberating through all the fashionable neighbourhoods.
And so on, all the way down the list. Tory ‘austerity’ (a meek attempt to restore a semblance of fiscal sanity) hurt the poor, presumably by reducing their number. The gap between the rich and the poor? Deplorable and “destabilising”. Public reaction to the rise of jihadist sentiments among young British Muslims? “Hysterical”. Israel’s presence in “occupied territories”? “Unlawful”. Avoiding extortionist taxes? “Wrong”. Rwanda scheme? “Morally unacceptable”.
Nor did Welby put his corporate experience to good use after switching careers. The financial affairs of the Church were badly mismanaged, and many of the 3,000 churches that closed down did so for lack of funds. The good prelate responded to the shortfall by insisting that the Church must shell out £100 million to atone for whatever part it had played in slavery.
This is the kind of woke nonsense one would expect from Jeremy Corbyn, not from a prelate in the Church of England, but Welby is personally invested. Apparently, he recently found out that one of his forebears used to be a slave owner, and now the whole Church must atone for Welby’s blood guilt.
And yet, as I said, I wish he could stay. The way the C of E is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if it fast-tracked Corbyn to the archdiocese, bypassing ordination and such incidentals as Jeremy’s atheism.
That old woman of Eastern folklore was wise. Every new tyrant is usually worse than his predecessor. So, if recent history is anything to go by, is each new Archbishop of Canterbury.
This is exactly my concern with the Chair of Saint Peter. Many may hope (and even pray) for an end to the reign of the current pontiff, without full regard to his successor. Robert Cardinal Sarah may be a favorite of traditional Catholics, but the possibility of him being elected seems slim. We might get a pope who is even more progressive than Pope Francis.
We may indeed, Brian. No, scratch that. We almost certainly will.