Gnats and Camels

The wonders of Christian love are once again in evidence in the ongoing farce that is the Church of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury blames the petering out of John's second coming on the fact that his candidacy for the Southwark bishopric was leaked to the media, "enabling conservative clerics to stop the appointment". Evidently, if the leak had not taken place and John had been appointed, the lunatic fringe would have accepted his elevation as a sign of the Divine Will and gone quietly and modestly about the Lord's business until the time grew ripe for them to re-open the wound about female bishops.

I am not certain how much time, effort and noise has been expended over this earth-shaking moral question of whether or not women and homosexuals are second-order human beings and thereby fit only to be subordinate Christians. I am sure a good deal less noise emerged from the ranks of the Anglican civil war when the Archbishop of York proclaimed that he had nothing to say to make sense of the earthquake in Haiti - in other words, that the church's second most senior theologian is a self-confessed incompetent at justifying the more merciful ways of God to humanity.