More from the bishop

Regular readers will recall my letter to Christopher Hill, the Bishop of Guildford.

The Rt. Revd. Hill did me the courtesy of a reply, and we exchanged subsequent letters. He requested that I not publish the subsequent correspondence, so, of course, I won't.

In general though, the bishop is not averse to publicising his views. Of course, one would assume that was mandatory for a cleric of a proselytising religion; but my attention was drawn to a piece in the Church Times which is almost wholly political (God and Christ are mentioned once each in a final paragraph that it is not related to the thrust of the article, and appears almost as an afterthought).

It appears that Rt. Revd. Hill chairs something called the House of Bishops' Europe Panel. The article follows David Cameron's refusal to cede parliamentary control of the British budget to European institutions, to allow a European tax on an industry that is predominantly situated in the UK, and to pay tens of billions of extra pounds to bail out eurozone banks and some eurozone countries (remembering, perhaps, that the eurozone taken as a whole is in a slightly better financial position than the sterling zone). The bishop opines "In the long term, it will be disastrous if we were actually isolated from the rest of Europe, economically and in terms of international relations", along with screeds of similar guff that I shan't repeat.

In other words, we should go along with whatever the leaders of France and Germany want, whether or not their own people want it, whether or not our people want it, whether or not we could ever recover our democracy, whether or not we are unfairly targeted for exactions, whether or not any of it will work on its own terms. And, as the argument goes, all to retain some "influence"—which the likes of Rt. Revd. Hill will always find reasons not to deploy.

The bishop makes no effort to suggest that his recommendations are those of which God would approve. His intervention seems wholly political. I am forced to the conclusion that monies placed on the collection plate subsidise prelates to push a political agenda that is not my own. And I'm afraid that thought trumps the blandishments in the bishop's private letters.