To Find a Bishop

When asked my opinion about the Bishop-elect of Dorking, announced on Maundy Thursday to be the Revd Jo Wells, my usual response (depending on how facetious I feel I can be) is to express admiration that the Church of England cast its net so widely. All the way to the far side of the Archbishop of Canterbury's office, in fact: Revd Wells is currently Justin Welby's chaplain, and married, to boot, to the Vicar of St Martin in the Fields. It was a nice matter to decide which of them would be raised to the episcopal bench first, I'm told. Perhaps in the fullness of time they may both be. Won't that be nice. 

Facetiousness aside, the Diocese of Guildford now has two moderate evangelical bishops, and before long the only Catholic voice in the senior ranks of the diocese will be the Cathedral's - a somewhat diluted Catholic voice at that. Mind you, a couple of years ago both of the bishops were mild Catholics, so it is perhaps the swing of the pendulum. 

It is, however, a large and slow-moving pendulum and one which has been swinging this way for some time. It's increasingly hard to find clergy from the Catholic end of the spectrum to occupy senior positions, even those that have traditionally gone to them. Top posts (of which there really aren't very many) tend now to go to evangelicals because they're the only game in town. Not long ago I was contacted by the diocesan training department who have woken up to the lack of vocations emerging from the Catholic end of the Church and want to stage a mini-conference about it (they recently put together a video encouraging vocations among younger people, and evangelical bias was only one of those on awkward display in it), which I've offered to host at Swanvale Halt. My suggestion will be that vocations can only grow from parishes which are developing an active and healthy Christian life and that if the diocese really wants that to happen it'll have to do some pump-priming in a group of selected parishes - send them curates regardless of whether they qualify under the current rules, or fund children's-and-families workers - and not expect much in the way of results for a generation or so. Swanvale Halt may not be one of them, of course. I don't know whether they'll really want to hear that.

This week I spoke to S.D. who had spent Holy Week at St John the Divine, Kennington, a very longstanding trad-Catholic parish which shows that it can be done. 'There were 60-70 people at mass every weekday and 300 communicants on Good Friday', he told me, 'It was wonderful.' It was, I reflected, April 1st when we had our conversation, but even then S.D. doesn't need that occasion to exaggerate outrageously.