Somebody has leaked to the Guardian a sensitive email from the Rt Rev Andrew Burnham, “flying” Bishop of Ebbsfleet, to Bishop Peter Elliott of Melbourne, the Catholic auxiliary bishop in charge of implementing Anglicanorum coetibus in Australia.

In it, Bishop Burnham ”“ an outstanding and inspiring Anglo-Catholic leader ”“ confirms what we’ve all long suspected: that there are forces in the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales who hate the Pope’s plan and want Anglicans to stay Anglican. Or, as he puts it, “who think that Anglicans are best off doing what they are presently doing”.

Bishop Burnham will be embarrassed by this leak, which reveals that in order to make sure that the Ordinariate project is not “smothered” he has been talking privately to Mgr Patrick Burke at the CDF (another great priest, by the way). He’s also a bit disobliging about Archbishop Hepworth of the Traditional Anglican Communion.

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A new web-based service from the Church of England, launched today to mark the beginning of Lent, lets people across the country confidentially share their hopes and concerns anonymously in the form of a prayer ”“ and also have those thoughts offered to God by a bishop.

Prayers received via www.SayOneForMe.org over the next 40 days will be displayed on the site and shared with a number of Church of England bishops, who have agreed to remember the submissions in their own prayers over the season. The website invites visitors to type in their prayers ”“ and then click ”˜Amen’ to post them.

The Rt Revd David Walker, Bishop of Dudley, says: “Priests are well used to having people shout at us ”˜say one for me’. Whatever the initial intention of that yell in the street, underlying it is the fact that people feel a need to pray ”“ especially during difficult times. Our visits today and the new website are both simple ways for us to harness that desire and engage with people where they are. Of course, nobody needs a dog collar to be heard by God, but for many people, knowing that someone else is praying for us gives us the confidence to make our own prayers, and prayer is often the gateway to hope. The website allows people to share their prayers anonymously via their own home computer or even on the move through a mobile device.”

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The Rt Revd Dr Tom Butler, Anglican Bishop of Southwark since 1998, will retire at the beginning of March when he reaches his 70th birthday.

This week he presided and preached at the Sunday morning Choral Eucharist at Southwark Cathedral for the last time.

The Eucharist was attended by the Mayor of Southwark Cllr Jeff Hook and North Southwark and Bermondsey MP Simon Hughes as well as representatives from Southwark’s twin cathedrals in Bergen, Norway and Rouen, France.

“As well as being the mother church of the diocese, this holy place is home ”“ week in, week out ”“ to its own congregation of faithful people and it is with you that I wanted to spend my last Sunday here,” said the Bishop as he began his sermon. “And it is very appropriate that today is St Valentine’s Day ”“ for I love this place.”

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The 40-day period of penitence before Easter typically sees observant Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox Christians give up meat, alcohol or chocolates.

But this year’s initiative aims to convince those observing Lent to try a day without an iPod or mobile phone in a bid to reduce the use of electricity ”” and thus trim the amount of carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere.

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This week’s meeting of General Synod is being dominated by a debate that does not actually appear on the agenda. A year ago synod passed a motion calling for the legislation that will make it possible for women to be bishops in the Church of England. Included in that motion was a request to the drafting committee to bring its proposals to the synod meeting this February. For a ­variety of reasons, it has failed to do so.

Instead, the Bishop of Manchester, chair of the steering committee, on Monday gave synod a summary of what it had been doing for the past year. With over 300 written submissions to consider, and with the option of synod members to make oral submissions as well, it clearly had its work cut out. No one can accuse it of slacking.

But what should have been a more straightforward process, coming at the end of a 35-year debate, has turned into a tortuous marathon, with requests for every conceivable type of provision for the minority of people in the church who still do not accept that women can ”“ or should ”“ exercise episcopal ministry.

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The Archbishop of Canterbury will fight threats of disintegration in the Church of England with what is expected to be a forceful intervention at the General Synod today.

Dr Rowan Williams is determined to challenge the increasingly bitter infighting sparked by disagreements over women bishops in England and gay ordinations in the US.

In one of the most important presidential addresses of his seven-year archiepiscopacy, described by one insider as a “brilliant piece of work”, the Archbishop is expected to salvage hope from the despair felt by many Anglicans over pressure brought by the liberal, evangelical and Catholic wings of the established Church.

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Ordaining women as bishops would be “a mistake”, a group of 50 clergy has warned in a letter to the Church of England General Synod.

The clergy, linked to the evangelical group Reform, say adequate safeguards for objectors to the plan are needed.

If not, the Church could see a drastic cut in the number of men training for the priesthood and a multi-million pound drop in funding, they warn.

The General Synod began its week-long meeting on Monday.

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The Church of England is to go ahead with the plan to create women bishops without giving in to demands from traditionalists for a separate structure of bishops and archbishops untainted by the hands of a woman.

Traditionalists oppose women bishops because they argue that Jesus had no women disciples and that the apostolic succession of bishops, passed down by the laying of hands at ordination, should therefore be male.

Traditionalists warned last night that the decision, to be announced at the General Synod today, will trigger an exodus from the Church of England of many thousands of priests and lay people.

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One of our strengths as a nation is that we are a land of immigrants. Over the centuries, people have come to this country, fleeing conflict or seeking new opportunities, from other parts of the British Isles, from mainland Europe, or from further afield, to enrich and develop our common life.

Many of us will have Scottish or Welsh blood in our veins. Others trace our ancestry to the West Indies or Pakistan, though we ourselves are English. In Leeds, we have one of the larger Jewish populations in the country, and our city has benefited immensely from their contribution.

Yet, frequently in recent years, there have been expressions of fear over the role of immigrants to our country, and they have surfaced
again with the recent declaration of the cross-party Group on Balanced Migration. This calls for political parties to declare, in the run-up to the General Election, how they will restrict immigration. One of the signatories has described Britain as “our claustrophobic island”.

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[Today]…Christians keep the feast of Candlemas, 40 days after Christmas. For some it will be kept this Sunday. Candlemas, with its candle procession and theme of light, commemorates the story in St Luke’s Gospel of the child Jesus being brought to the Temple in Jerusalem to be presented to the Lord. As Mary and Joseph carry the child into the Temple, two old and devout people, Simeon and Anna, meet them. Simeon, Luke tells us, has looked for “the consolation of Israel”. The word translated consolation is the word that St John uses for the Holy Spirit ”” “the Paraclete”, a word that means advocate, comforter, even goader. Simeon is longing for transformation and deliverance, for God’s salvation to come to his people. He longs for liberation in a land that is occupied territory, he longs for transformation and renewal, which is the “paracleting”, the Holy Spiriting of his people.

Simeon, with his rheumy eyes, encounters a child carried in by two poor parents. Suddenly he sees in this child the salvation he desires. He bursts out into the great cry of thanksgiving that we know as the Nunc Dimittis. “Lord, now you can let your servant go in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation!” This song of Simeon, rightly used at funerals, is often heard as a lament, a gentle commendation, but in the story of the Presentation in the Temple, as Luke tells it, is rather a great cry of triumph. In the same way at the end of the Creed Christians “look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come”. This is no casual glancing forward, but the burning hope that waits with longing expectation for the transfiguring of our earthly bodies and the fulfilment of eternal life.

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Lord Lester of Herne Hill, countering this, said: “Removing proportionality . . . would inevitably lead to complex and costly litigation . . . [which] would require the principle of proportionality to be applied as part of the law of the land, whatever the movers of these amendments and the seven Bishops now present may say. It is the law under European law and it is the law of the land. Proportionality is required whether they like it or not.”

The Archbishop of York and the Bishops of Winchester and Exeter also spoke in the debate. Dr Sentamu said: “Successive legislation over the past 35 years has always recognised the principle that religious organisations need the freedom to impose requirements in relation to belief and conduct that go beyond what a secular employer should be able to require.

“Noble Lords may believe that Roman Catholics should allow priests to be married; they may think that the Church of England should hurry up and allow women to become bishops; they may feel that many churches and other religious organisations are wrong on matters of sexual ethics. But if religious freedom means anything, it must mean that those are matters for the churches and other religious organisations to determine in accordance with their own convictions. They are not matters for the law to impose.”

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The future of religious broadcasting, a topic that will be discussed at synod in a few weeks time, is something that affects more than just the BBC. Attending “religion in the media” dos it becomes plain that pretty much all religious voices feel poorly represented by what they call the media. I want to take that perception with a huge pinch of salt, because in an open society it isn’t the function of professional journos to represent any religious leader’s point of view accurately so they won’t have to, but to report on what’s going on clearly and accurately. In a media environment with no middle men, religious leaders should learn to speak up clearly for themselves, and take the consequences. They shouldn’t expect the BBC to do this for them, because it can’t and shouldn’t. Yet, the fact that a whole range of religious leaders representing every major tradition in the UK feel chronically misunderstood must mean something. No smoke without fire.

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Bishops, clergy and lay members of the General Synod will vote on whether to demand that the state broadcaster explain why its coverage of Christianity on television has declined so steeply in recent years.

Output has fallen from 177 hours of religious programming on BBC television in 1987-88 to 155 hours in 2007-08, while the number of general programmes has doubled.

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A key debate on women bishops has been delayed until the summer after the Church of England received an “avalanche” of submissions about the subject, it was announced today.

The Church said more than 100 submissions had been received by a legislative drafting group working on the issue of women bishops.

It had been hoped that the legislation could be debated by the General Synod, the church’s ruling body, meeting in London next month but this will not now take place until it meets at York in July.

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A Church of England bishop has warned that the former Archbishop of Canterbury’s call for new limits on immigration would “play into the hands of racists”.

The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Right Rev John Packer, is the latest Anglican cleric to criticise Lord Carey of Clifton after he said in an article in The Times that he feared the present levels of immigration threatened “the very ethos or the DNA of our nation”.

Lord Carey is a member of the crossparty parliamentary group on balanced migration, which last week urged the political parties to make a commitment to keeping Britain’s population below 70 million.

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THE draft legislation on women bishops will not be coming before the General Synod for debate next month as scheduled. Instead, the revision committee is expected still to be working on it after Easter. It will not now be debated till July.

In February last year, the Synod asked the revision committee to consider the arrangements, embodied in a statutory code of practice, for those opposed in conscience to women bishops.

At its October 2009 meeting, however, it appeared to move away from the code of practice, and voted for “the vesting by statute of certain functions in bishops with a special responsibility for those with con­scientious difficulties”. The options of an alternative diocese or a regis­tered society for objectors were ruled out, but it appears there was no vote on the adoption of the simplest form of legislation without a statutory code of practice.

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The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester, said the country must never again repeat the multicultural experiment of recent decades.

He also called for an end to the segregation of Muslims in British cities, which he warned provides a breeding ground for extremists.

The bishop made his strongly-worded comments after Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, backed a campaign by the cross-party Balanced Immigration Group to stop Britain’s population reaching 70 million.

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Britain might soon have its first female Anglican bishop, serving the 38,000-member Scottish Episcopal Church, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

The Rev. Alison Peden, 57, is one of three candidates for the post of bishop of Glasgow and Galloway. The election is scheduled for Jan. 16.

Observers say that if Peden is elected it is likely to increase pressure on the neighbouring (Anglican) Church of England to allow the appointment of women bishops.

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Congratulations on being amongst the 13% of people in Britain going to church this Christmas morning. That’s nearly 8 million people, but according to a news report earlier this month the average British Christmas today goes a bit differently. A survey across 4000 families showed the following average timings for Christmas Day. 8.19 ”“ open presents (it used to be 5.30 in ours); 8.39 ”“ first bite of chocolate; 9.57 ”“ first family row; 11.48 ”“ first alcoholic drink; 3.24 ”“ Christmas dinner (I thought it was just vicars!); 4.58 ”“ first person falls asleep. And so on.

It’s all very family-centred. We do our best to be together on Christmas day, even if there are lots of family tensions around. And the whole advertising of Christmas is predicated on the image of happy families gathered around the dining table or the Christmas tree. But there’s another side to Christmas. 50,000 young people will be ‘homeless’ at Christmas, having left home or been thrown out of home for a whole range of dysfunctionalities. The number of Big Issue sellers in Oxford city centre yesterday told its own story too. The other side of Christmas is homelessness.

But that’s part of the Christmas story too. The well-worn Christmas narrative tells of a God who lets himself be homeless in a fragile world. There are two expressions of that homelessness. The first is the picture we’re all used to of a vulnerable family for whom there’s no room at the inn, and who have to be packed off to the stable round the back. Of course, we don’t know that it was a stable ”“ it’s the Nativity plays that say that, the gospels don’t. It’s most likely that the place was a cave behind a house or an inn. Indeed the Greek word used for inn ‘kataluma’ usually refers to the upper guest room of a family house. It may be that there was no room for Mary because it was a family house (Joseph’s family perhaps) and the room was already full because of other family visitors who’d come for the census. Mary therefore had to go to the warm cave at the back of the house where the animals were kept. So it’s a cave, not a stable, that we see under the Church of the Nativity today.

But whatever the actual place, there was no room in the ‘kataluma’, the ordinary, civilized places. Jesus was homeless.

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The season of Epiphany is about journeys. I love the story of Nevill Mott, Master of Caius College, Cambridge and former Professor of Physics at the University of Bristol. He was on a train from London to Bristol when he simultaneously remembered three things: first, he was no longer Professor of Physics at Bristol but at Cambridge; second, he had gone to London by car and not by train; and third, he had been accompanied by his wife.

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The Bishop of Ripon & Leeds, the Rt Revd John Packer, has rejected claims by the Unite trade union that bullying among the clergy is “rife”.

The allegation is based on figures released by the union, which says it deals with 150 cases of bullying among the clergy a year. Unite currently has 2500 members in its faith-workers branch, the majority of whom are ministers of religion.

Last month, the union backed the Revd Mark Sharpe in his case against the diocese of Worcester. Mr Sharpe said that he had been the victim of a four-year campaign of harassment in the Teme Valley South benefice (News, 18/25 December). Unite described the benefice as “toxic” (see below).

Rachael Maskell, a national officer at Unite, said that cases of bullying among the clergy they were dealing with were becoming nastier, “to the point of criminal activity.

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The Right Reverend and Right Honourable Monsignor Graham Leonard, who died on January 6 aged 88, was the most senior Anglican churchman to convert to the Roman Catholic Church since the Reformation.

During 10 years as Bishop of London, the third most senior see in the Church of England, he proved a controversial figure because of his strong conservative views on most aspects of faith, morals and Church order at a time when there were proposals for many changes in all Churches.

With considerable skill in the realm of Church politics, he also led an effective assault in the House of Lords on the 1988 Education Reform Bill, which secured the strengthening of the place of religious education in schools. He checked plans to unite the Church of England and the Methodists, and ensured that the formal ban on divorced people being remarried in church was maintained.

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I am looking forward to the Christmas festival more than usually this year. Some times in the past it has been obscured by the light pollution from which we suffer in great cities during the season of getting and spending. This year we have been forced to face up to the darkness in this very perilous world and as a result it is perhaps easier to see the star which leads us to the significance of the birth of Christ. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.

The Copenhagen Conference, as I speak, is drawing to its inconclusive end, promising further negotiations. The wisdom of the world has been on display with its sectarian mentality. It has helped me to see freshly once again the astonishing and dangerous generosity in the Christmas story. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. The messenger of God comes to Mary and instead of replying that the promised god-send did not fit in with her own life plan, she said “Behold the hand maid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word”.

The sectarian mentality and the frequent lack of interest in anything that was “not invented here” are huge obstacles on the road to God’s future for the world. Dante the great poet of the Christian West, at the end of his Divine comedy, describes that future as “all the scattered leaves of the universe bound by love in one volume”. The Church is called to be the transforming community created by the generosity of God working to open a fissure in the world so that God’s future can enter in. This is why we pray “thy kingdom come” to open up the present to God’s end time.

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The adorable baby becomes one of the group of young people who hangs around on street corners, gathering with friends in a public place for safety but unnerving others in the neighbourhood and we do not always find it easy to see that young person as the infinitely precious and infinitely adorable person that they once were.

The adorable baby ends up as a child imprisoned in a detention centre – separated from her mother in a dawn raid just because her mother is seeking sanctuary in our country. We seem to have forgotten how infinitely adorable and infinitely precious those children once were

The adorable baby even in this country ends up living in poverty. Close to home in Sunderland over 50% of children are living in poverty. Many in the Council and elsewhere are working hard to do something about it. But somehow it has happened and I am left wondering whether if we had continued to see those children as infinitely adorable and infinitely precious things might be different

The Christmas story is a story of a baby – a baby who is most certainly infinitely precious and infinitely adorable to Mary and Joseph and for Christians the world over rightly adorable and rightly precious because he is God come to share our human life. But the real point of the story is not that the baby is infinitely precious but that we are infinitely precious.

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The Christmas message is supposed to be “good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.” How, though, is this credible amidst such encircling economic and eco-gloom?

The Copenhagen Conference has ended somewhat inconclusively. The prospect of a binding and ambitious agreement on reducing carbon emissions seems itself to have been reduced to a prelude for further negotiations. How the human race is collectively to face the reality of climate change in the 21st century remains troublingly unclear.

Yet the decisive action that Copenhagen had promised, but ultimately has failed to deliver, cannot be avoided forever. The Christian community is being recalled by this crisis to a more genuinely Biblical view of creation and our place within it. It is clear that the effects of climate change will be felt first by some of the most vulnerable communities in the world and those least able to bear the costs of adaptation….

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Given the sea of troubles with which we are faced ”“ at home and elsewhere ”“ what can we look forward to as we face 2010? First, we need to accept that the financial and political crises are not primarily about the failure of procedures and regulation. The angst about the war in Afghanistan, similarly, is not just about the sad loss of life. The broader problem is that there has been the loss of a common narrative, a story which underpins our national life. In the past, this was provided by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, derived from the Bible. This narrative has been at the root of those values which we regard as particularly British, whether to do with the dignity of the human person, with fundamental freedoms of belief, speech and assembly, or with equality ”“ which is not about “sameness”, but a recognition of the image of God in others.

This tradition has also provided us with the virtues for which we have looked in vain in our economic and political leaders. The best of British business and politics has been characterised by a sense ”“ largely derived from the Bible’s teachings ”“ of responsibility, of trust, justice, fairness and truth-telling. In recent years, these virtues have been jettisoned, so that we can be more “competitive” in a cut-throat world, or engage in a more adversarial form of politics. We, and the generations to follow, will have to live with the consequences of this dissolution of a moral and spiritual framework for our common life.

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From beginning to end this was a work of love, by the God whose very being is love, who created us in love for himself, and who in love stoops down to the very lowest part of our need. As another poet, Christopher Smart, puts it:

God all bounteous, all creative,
Whom no ills from good dissuade,
Is incarnate, and a native,
Of the very world he made!

The God whom we know and worship and adore is not a distant God, not a God of ideas and abstractions, but a God who comes to us as one of us, who comes among us in the fragility of an unborn life, beginning as we begin as those formed in the hiddenness of our mother’s wombs ”“ which is why Christians can never be casual about caring for that unborn life, can never treat abortion as no more than a matter of choice. God identifies with us from the very beginning, going, as Bishop Lancelot Andrewes once said, ”˜to the very ground-sill of our nature.’ St Paul wrote to the Christians of Corinth of how for Christians the power of God was know most paradoxically in the weakness of the cross, the crucified God was the one who saved ”“ yet that foolishness of God, that weakness of God, is already there at Bethlehem in the child laid in the pricking straw of the manger, which devout Christians saw as foreshadowing the sharpness of the crown of thorns of the crucified.

Christmas speaks to us of a God who is love totally and completely, a God who loves us so recklessly and in so overwhelming a fashion, that he comes down to the lowest part of our need. He speaks to us as one of us, as our flesh and blood, which is why St John sums up the mystery of the incarnation as ”˜the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’. And St John goes on to say that in that total self-giving of love, ”˜we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.’ No wonder the shepherds on the cold hills outside Bethlehem were startled by the angelic armies of heaven singing ”˜Glory to God in the highest, and one earth peace goodwill towards men!’ If that is indeed the truth of the God who made the vastness of the universe, and the richness of creation, and who also made you and me, every human being, in the image and likeness of his love, then to live by and from that love and grace which came to us at Bethlehem to take us by the hand, is to live by that which alone can sustain us and transform us, and transform the whole world, into that new creation which is our end, our purpose, and our very being. This is indeed our story and our song; this is our life and our mission to the world; this is the love we are called to live; and this is the eternal life which here and now we are given, as the Child of Bethlehem feeds us with his own life in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. ”˜O come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord!’

It is in that faith and love that I wish you the true and joy and blessing of Christmas.

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The Anglican Bishop of Salisbury has backed a move aimed at supporting mutuals and credit unions.

The Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies and Credit Unions Bill introduced in the House of Lords by Labour peer Lord Tomlinson would reform the regulations governing the sector.

Bishop David Stancliffe said: “The reality is that there is a big gulf between those who have access to credit and those who do not. We need to support this timely Bill.

“With the mainstream banking sector in some disrepute, customers need a reliable and honest home for their money.

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