Britannia Radio

November 22, 2010

MELANIE PHILLIPS

The shallow flimflam of Bishop Pete

Daily Mail, 22 November 2010

For those who despair that the Church of England has progressed beyond satire, along comes a joke bishop to ram the point home.

The Bishop of Willesden, Pete Broadbent, has predicted on his Facebook page that the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton will last for only seven years.

This was because the young couple were, he declared, ‘shallow celebrities’ and the Royal Family full of ‘philanderers’ with a record of marriage break-ups — notably the divorce of ‘Big Ears and the Porcelain Doll’, otherwise known as Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales.

Such remarks were unbelievably crass, spiteful and stupid. How on earth can this absurd churchman purport to know how long William and Kate’s marriage will last?

Does he perhaps have a professional sideline reading the tea-leaves at church fetes?

He may not care for the hoopla around the impending nuptials; but to call William and Kate ‘shallow celebrities’ surely only reveals the shallowness of his own mind.

For he has no idea whether they are shallow or deep. All he knows is how the media represent them.

Yet on that basis he gratuitously insulted their characters. And his remarks about Prince William’s parents amounted to no more than cruel and infantile name- calling.

Yet look at the feeble way Lambeth Palace has responded to this diatribe, declaring that the bishop was ‘entitled to his views’.

Well actually, no he is not. As a bishop of the Church of England, anything he says has the imprimatur of the Church.

These were sour, offensive, hurtful remarks which by themselves therefore risk bringing the Church into disrepute.

But this wasn’t all he said. In a previous Twitter entry (and isn’t there something more than faintly ludicrous and unseemly about a cleric aged 58 calling himself ‘Bishop Pete’ and who burbles incontinently on Twitter and Facebook?) he tweeted: ‘Need to work out what date in the spring or summer I should be booking my republican day trip to France.’

The remark then appeared on his Facebook page, provoking the question: ‘Isn’t the Queen your boss?’

To which Bishop Broadbent replied: ‘I am a citizen, not a subject!’— adding elsewhere, for good measure, that the hereditary basis of the monarchy was ‘corrupt and sexist’.

Now all this takes the bishop’s remarks onto a different plane altogether. For he was not just shooting his mouth off over the ‘national flimflam’ of the wedding.

He was not just being offensive about members of the Royal Family. Nor was he just embarrassing his immediate superior, the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, who also happens to be a close confidant of Prince Charles.

He was also effectively denying the constitutional position of the Church of England — and indeed, similarly repudiating his own undertakings as a bishop of that Church.

For the monarchy and the Church of England are umbilically linked. The Queen is Supreme Governor of the Church — as will be Prince William when he inherits the Crown — and the monarch is pledged to defend the faith which that Church represents.

Moreover, when he was ordained into the Church of England, Bishop Broadbent will have sworn ‘true allegiance to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors, according to law, so help me God’.

So did he falsely swear an oath in which he didn’t believe at the time? Or does he no longer believe it, making him a ­hypocrite who should depart the Church whose vow of loyalty he now rejects?

And when he ordains priests in turn, how can he require them to swear allegiance to an institution he regards as ‘corrupt and sexist’?

It would seem to many scarcely credible that a bishop can be so ignorant and — well, so un-Christian. But alas, it is only too credible given the recent record of this Church.

After all, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams loses no opportunity to apologise for just about everything the Church has done.

Instead of providing a bulwark against the secular onslaught upon the Judeo- Christian values which form the bedrock of this society, the Church has been in the forefront of appeasing ideologues of every stripe who are intent upon destroying ­family, morality and nation.

This supine and suicidal cultural cringe has developed remorselessly from a loss of faith by the Church in its own supernatural story, a process going back to the middle of the 19th century if not before.

As it came to believe that the Bible was no more than a kind of fairytale, the Church filled the vacuum it was creating by turning itself into a branch of social work at home and cheerleader for radical ‘liberation theology’ abroad. It thus lined itself up with the Third World and Marxists at home and abroad, often taking their part against the West.

Far from shoring itself up, as it so vainly hoped, the Church not only found itself as a result with empty pews but proceeded to tear itself apart over divisive issues such as women priests and homosexuality.

It is not surprising that the Pope chose Britain for the warning he delivered on his recent visit that Christianity needed urgently to rediscover its voice and resist the tide of secularism which was threatening to take the West back to a dark age of irrationality, intolerance and even fascism.

What’s really striking is that Benedict XVI, so thoughtlessly excoriated as the ultimate reactionary, has now shown a ­measure of tactical adroitness quite absent from the Church of England.

It has emerged to general astonishment that he has written in a new book that the use of condoms might be justified in certain circumstances, such as preventing the spread of HIV and Aids.

Such a softening of his previously apparently unshakeable opposition to all forms of contraception is surely calculated to help garner support for a Catholic creed he fears may be ­crumbling, taking Christian Europe with it.

By comparison, the Church of England remains paralysed by a political correctness which threatens to spell its destruction. This in turn threatens the nation. The decline of the Church has already helped undermine and enfeeble Britain’s values and its sense of itself, leaving it undefended against a series of destructive ideologies.

And the more these values have been eroded, the more the Church has allowed itself to be sucked into a vortex of appeasement, giving increasing ground to the secular dogma which ultimately will destroy it — and with it Britain’s historic identity.

The fact is that the fates of monarchy, Church and nation are inextricably linked. Which is why Prince William’s marriage is important, as is his commitment to defend the faith of this nation when he becomes King.

But if the Church that is the vehicle for that faith itself repudiates the monarchy, then Britain’s historic identity will finally fade away.

Which is why, to demonstrate that Bishop Pete is merely a rogue cleric, the Church might perhaps do well to conclude that his manifold, er, talents are simply wasted on this country. What a kindness it would be to appoint him instead to an Anglican see somewhere that is not groaning under the yoke of monarchy.

Congo, perhaps, or Korea, or Yemen. No shallow royal ‘flimflam’ there, for sure.

So come on, Lambeth — release Bishop Pete from his misery in ‘fawning, deferential’ Britain. Send him to a third world tyranny where he would discover just what ‘fawning, deferential’ behaviour really amounted to.

Willesden’s loss — which it would bravely bear — would surely be his (and the nation’s) gain.