The Churches
Divine Differentials
By MONICA FURLONG DEARLY love a bishop. Not, as it happens, any I particular one, but the general complexion of bishops, their colourfulness and confidence, their dignity and detachment, their equipment and clothes. I am even partial to gaiters (there are plenty of athletes among the episcopate after all) and I was saddened to notice at Canterbury after the Enthronement that almost everyone except the Bishop of Sheffield seemed to prefer trousers the Enthronement that almost everyone except the Bishop of Sheffield seemed to prefer trousers to tradition, having at long last taken to heart the remark of Gaby Deslys (when rebuked by the Church for the indecency of her dress), '1 love your bishops but they show too much leg.' What, 1 wonder, would she have thought of a Chinese bishop I know who was frisked by brigands on the way to take a confirmation and arrived wearing only khaki shorts and mitre?
My enthusiasm, it must be admitted, is idiosyn- cratic, not to say odd; indeed, to anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the Church of England, it must be obvious that ,bishop-baiting is Anglicans' favourite blood-sport. Objecting to it, as 1 am trying to do, is about as much use as criticising fox-hunting at a meet of the Pytchley. Nevertheless I believe it is part of a classic Anglican error, the error of not realising that though our Church permits a measure of intelligent insubordination, the rest of the time we are required to be as carefully obedient as the other lot. The most difficult thing for Anglicans to do is to stick to the rules. It is at once our besetting sin and our neurosis, a notoriously difficult condition to cure. Mention discipline to us and we run, screaming wild imprecations at our father-figures in God, into incipient schism.
(If any Roman Catholics reading this care to busy themselves with something else for a minute, it would be a most delicate attention.
Where did we get this nasty trauma in the first place, anyway?) At the bottom of it all perhaps is the weakness common to all the major churches—that we care intensely about religion (a fanatic-making, compulsive, emotional thing) instead of caring intensely about God.
So there it is and the small, paragraphs in the papers tell their damaging story. At the moment we have any number of pipsqueaks rising excitedly to their feet to contradict Dr. Ramsey on Disestablishment, regardless of the fact that as yet the Archbishop has scarcely opened his mouth on the subject and that what he has said has been guarded to the point of obscurity. We have canons of St. Paul's muddling their bishop's views on nuclear disarmament with the riddles of conge (refire in utterly brainless fashion. (Why isn't the penalty of outlawry being enforced, by the way?) We have the Church Information Board publicly correcting the Bishop of Bedford, although the poor chap seems to have done nothing more than have a tentative chat with J. Walter Thompson. (Do the public relations men really believe that putting ads in the papers will get people to' church? To think people call parsons naive!) A little family loyalty here and there might do no harm, one feels. A much more serious issue currently being discussed concerns the matter of bishops' pen- sions. A reader in Peterborough writes to say she is scandalised that diocesan bishops should accept a pension of £1,250 (£2,000 for arch- bishops, £1,750 for three senior bishops) when ordinary clergy are merely to get £400 and their widows £133. She mentions the shining example of Bishop Haigh who, disgusted by the secularity of the measure, refuses to accept his increase until a fairer arrangement has been made.
It is a temptation to defend this measure in secular terms, to say, as a businessman might, that the greater responsibility and ability of a bishop demands a marked differential and that only by suitably rewarding top talent among the clergy will one attract the right sort of young man, etc. etc. Tempting, but utterly un-Christian, of course, since to a Christian one man's work is only of greater value than another's if he comes nearer to fulfilling God's purpose for him, and God, one suspects, is not much of a 'One for bishops.
Until God sends a directive to Church Assembly, however, we are driven to debating the status of bishops as intelligently and theologi- cally as we can. What we have to decide is whether we want the bishop to go on playing his tradi- tional role in the twentieth century. Do we want him as a kind of aristocrat of the Church forming part of an intellectual and spiritual elite? In which case, in return for the colour and detachment and scholarship we expect him to provide, we must be prepared to keep him in the style elites expect. Or do we now see him purely as the father-in- God, identified with his clergy and people as closely as possible? In which case, apart from plentiful money for books, petrol and entertain- ing, he needs no more than the parish priest, once we have converted his ramshackle old palace into a compact residence with all mod. cons. The new pension measure falls between the two stools, giving us neither a splendid prince of the Church who might shed a little glamour as he shot past in his Rolls, nor the thoroughly engage leader with an overdraft as humiliating as that of any parish priest. It is high time that the moneyed and leisured people who alone can serve on Church Assembly (no real worker can take five days off in the middle of the week) put down their rich man's guilt and looked this thing squarely in the the eye. Bishops are not worth three times as much as parish priests. £400 a year is not enough pension for a worn-out clergyman to live on, and £133 a year is not enough to keep an old horse, let alone an elderly lady.
Church Assembly might be spurred to further action much more quickly, if more bishops fol- lowed Dr. Haigh's example. As I have already said I dearly love bishops and believe baiting them to be a sport strictly for the extroverts. On the other hand, if there is one issue more than another which would have• me searching for my lynching- outfit. . . . Gentlemen, it is time the Clergy Pen- sions Measure was re-examined.
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