Locked Down

Of course I can't see S.D. at the moment: I was due to go to London to visit him the day after, as it happened, I went into seclusion in March, but had already decided that discretion would keep me away from the capital. However, I was eventually able to speak to him and as usual he was a fund of helpful information. 

A friend of his (not a priest) cares for a church in Gloucestershire. It’s in the grounds of her (big) house. There are about fifteen families in the hamlet and hardly any services. She took a photograph of her daughter praying in the church and put it on Facebook. Clearly she was denounced to the Diocese because later she got a call telling her to keep the church locked:

‘I can’t lock it. It doesn’t have a lock. It hasn’t had a lock since the 14th century when it was built.’
‘Then you must chain and padlock it shut.’
‘I can’t. There’s nothing to put a chain on unless we put bolts into the walls.’
‘Then you must chain the churchyard shut.’
‘I can’t. There isn’t a gate. There isn’t even a wall or a fence.’
‘Then you must ensure the grass is not cut so people can’t get near the church.’

The background is of course the Church's plague regulations, the same ones that the Archbishop of Canterbury has now claimed were only ever intended as 'guidelines', yet which the Bishop of Rochester threatened his clergy with disciplinary measures for breaking. S.D. has never had that much affection for the Archbishop of Canterbury but what sympathy was there has now evaporated. His account of watching the Easter Day broadcast from Lambeth was perhaps the least scathing part of our conversation.

'He stood at his kitchen table, an Old Etonian in one of his two palaces, trying to convince the working classes that he's ordinary. He had a perfectly serviceable chapel yards away and my guess is that people would have been far more reassured to see him there instead. Nobody's taken in by this rubbish.'

- or words to that effect ...