The Church of England has received a rather lot of bad press, to put it mildly, after the Archbishop of Canterbury was forced to resign over the handling of a child abuse scandal. Now, rather than let salvation take its course, the Bishop of Dover has decided to wade into the conversation with some rather irreverent comments of her own.
The right reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin appeared on Thursday’s episode of the Times’ Off Air podcast with hosts Jane and Fi. But rather than settling into a saintly chinwag with the pod’s presenters, the Bishop of Dover became rather irate over the issue of Welby’s departure. Mr S would remind readers that the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury quit the top job last November after the publication of the Makin Review’s report on Church’s handling of the ‘serial child abuser’ John Smyth. Good heavens…
Despite Welby himself confessing his ‘long felt and profound sense of shame at the historic safeguarding failures of the Church of England’, Hudson-Wilkin seems unable to accept the situation. First shutting down any suggestion that she would put herself forward in his place, the Bishop went on to fume:
Having watched the way in which the Church – I’m using the word the ‘Church’; some people in the Church – have behaved so badly, they way they have chewed up our Archbishop and just spat him out as if he was nothing, that is so wrong.
But her venting didn’t stop there. In fact, the Bishop of Dover’s argument ascended into quite something else:
It rings with what happened to Christ. One day they are shouting ‘Hosanna, Hosanna’ – and then the following day they are shouting: ‘Crucify him, crucify him’.
Er, come again?
Perhaps Hudson-Wilkin knows better, but Mr S is rather sure the faithful devotees of the Church of England would rather that parallels were not drawn between an Archbishop forced out in disgrace over a child abuser and, um, God. Talk about sacrilegious, eh?
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