The Church of England is set to allow foreign archbishops to intervene in its affairs, secret papers reveal.

Under controversial plans being drawn up by the Church’s bishops, leaders from Africa and South America would be able to take over the care of parishes in this country.

They threaten to end the historic power of bishops to have ultimate control over their dioceses because parishes could ask for overseas prelates to carry out important duties, such as leading ordination services

The proposals are part of a covenant or rule book of beliefs that has been endorsed by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as a last ditch attempt to prevent the Anglican Church from splitting over gay clergy.

It is designed to stop provinces taking unilateral action and argues that Churches that defy traditional teaching should be asked to repent of their actions or face being expelled from the worldwide Communion. However, liberals have warned that these moves mark the most significant shift in the Anglican Church since the Reformation and could lead to a split in the Church of England.

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An epic drought in Georgia threatens the water supply for millions. Florida doesn’t have nearly enough water for its expected population boom. The Great Lakes are shrinking. Upstate New York’s reservoirs have dropped to record lows. And in the West, the Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting faster each year.

Across America, the picture is critically clear – the nation’s freshwater supplies can no longer quench its thirst.

The government projects that at least 36 states will face water shortages within five years because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought, population growth, urban sprawl, waste and excess.

“Is it a crisis? If we don’t do some decent water planning, it could be,” said Jack Hoffbuhr, executive director of the Denver-based American Water Works Association.

Water managers will need to take bold steps to keep taps flowing, including conservation, recycling, desalination and stricter controls on development.

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Loyalist Episcopalians in dioceses affiliated with the Anglican Communion Network feel isolated and lack access to important information to help them plan for their future, said Bonnie Anderson, president of the House of Deputies, during brief introductory remarks to Executive Council, Oct. 26 in Dearborn, Mich.

“Every time that I’m in one of those places, I get a lot of questions, both public and private,” she said. “I want Executive Council to be aware of the concerns of these people and to perhaps discuss responses to some of these. I don’t know the answer myself to all of these.”

Mrs. Anderson focused on a visit she made to Fort Worth, Texas, last month to attend a meeting organized by the local Via Media chapter. Using an overhead projector, she displayed a sampling of questions that she has received during her visits. Many of the questions relate to how these persons will remain connected if their dioceses realize plans to disaffiliate from The Episcopal Church.

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In his final years, the Rev. Paul Hoornstra faced heart disease, cancer, blindness, Parkinson’s disease and diabetes.

Through it all, he never questioned his belief in God.

“He only questioned which path to follow,” said his former Tuesday lunch buddy, Bryan Springthorpe.

Springthorpe’s biography, “Crossing the Bridge: The Life and Works of the Reverend Paul Hoornstra,” appears in bookstores and churches this month. The 361-page biography captures the events and struggles of the late Episcopalian priest known locally for launching two local churches and restoring a congregation on Tybee Island.

Springthorpe began work on the book shortly after Hoornstra’s death in 2003 at age 83.

“He was a fascinating guy and a great inspiration to me,” Springthorpe said.

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According to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ statement on communion, “grave matters” that should cause a person to refrain from communion include missing Mass on Sundays “without serious reason” and dishonoring one’s parents “by neglecting them in their need and infirmity.” Add being pro-choice, using birth control and engaging in premarital sex, says Father Robert Bussen of St. Mary of the Assumption Parish in Park City, and “if you really take the checklist seriously, nobody could receive communion.”

The canons of the Episcopal Church say that all “baptized Christians” are invited to communion. But more and more Episcopal churches aren’t following those rules, says the Rev. Canon Mary June Nestler, spokeswoman for the Episcopal Diocese of Utah. “Instead, they’re extending the invitation of communion to any person who feels led to receive it.”

That said, the Episcopal Church does recommend denying communion in some cases ”” described in the church’s Prayer Book as people who are “living a notoriously evil life” or “are a scandal to the other members of the congregation.”

In her 28 years of ordination, she says, she has never had to deny communion and has only witnessed two denials ”” a person involved in a serious financial misconduct of parish funds and the case of a triangle of adulterers. Even then, says the Rev. Nestler, the priest did not refuse communion on the spot. Instead, as advised in the Prayer Book, the priest spoke privately to them, advising them not to come to the communion table until they had given “clear proof of repentance and amendment of life.”

But faced with an uncertain situation, says the Rev. Nestler, “I would say it’s best to err on the side of generosity, because Christ’s table is a generous table. Second-guessing at the communion rail is always a difficult call.”

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Hundreds of Austrians stuck in loveless marriages may lie about their whereabouts this weekend. Instead of pursuing trysts, they’ll be attending a “divorce fair” to plan their return to single life.

At the two-day event in Vienna, fed-up spouses can contract private detectives to spy on philandering mates, hire real estate agents to find a new homes and book vacation packages designed for the newly separated. They can even hire a DNA sampling lab to see if it will really be necessary to pay child support.

“New Beginnings” is the world’s first divorce fair, according to Anton Barz, 37, a wedding organizer who came up with the idea after realizing that half of all unions were doomed.

“Austria’s divorce statistics are shocking,” Barz said in a café near Sigmund Freud’s former home in the Austrian capital. “People get a wedding certificate more easily than a driver’s license and have no idea of the consequences when they crash.”

Around 500 people are expected to attend the fair at the Vienna Marriott Hotel, where 20 vendors — including a local law firm hunting for new clients — will ply them with advice about how to settle their partnership problems.

Austria’s divorce rate rose to 49 percent in 2006 from 29 percent in 1987, according to government statistics released in June.

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Update: More here.

Dr. Jacobson conceded that was the case. He wrote in his retraction letter, “I am deeply embarrassed to have been the originator of such misstatements.”

It is not unusual for scientists to publish papers and, if they discover evidence that challenges them, to announce they were wrong. The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith.

So Dr. Jacobson’s retraction is in “the noblest tradition of science,” Rosalind Reid, editor of American Scientist, wrote in its November-December issue, which has Dr. Jacobson’s letter.

His letter shows, Ms. Reid wrote, “the distinction between a scientist who cannot let error stand, no matter the embarrassment of public correction,” and people who “cling to dogma.”

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“Today in this country, there are few priests I know living in a same-sex relationship. It is hard to measure but my suspicion is that there are many fewer gay people in the church today compared to when I was in my 20s. They seem to have given up on institutional religion and certainly the Christian church.”

David’s story is one of four that was related in an emotional audio presentation to leaders of the Australian Anglican Church this week.

All spoke on the condition of anonymity, their statements read by volunteers. Attendance was compulsory at this “listening process” mandated by the Lambeth Conference in 1998 in its call for dialogue between the church and lesbian and gay Christians.

But as Australia’s Anglican leader, the Archbishop of Brisbane, Dr Phillip Aspinall, lamented this week it has been hard to get cool, rational debate on the vexed issue of homosexuality.

Since the US Episcopal Church consecrated Robinson in 2003, the Anglican Communion has been teetering on the brink of schism. Rival wings of the church are now brawling over the fine details of the US church’s latest promise not to approve any more gay bishops or authorise the blessing of same-sex marriages for at least the next two years.

The Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, and his five bishops have not responded to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s invitation to Lambeth next year, a gathering of church leaders held every decade to plot the global church’s future. At its heart, Jensen says, the gay debate is a contest over the authority and reading of scripture.

“Nobody is saying we should throw gays out of the church,” says Mark Thompson, president of the Anglican Church League, which opposes same-sex blessings and gay clergy because it says homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture.

“We want gay people to hear about Jesus as we want others to hear about Jesus. The Bible calls on gay people to change their behaviour, just as it calls on me to turn away from temptations, whatever they are,” he says.

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My banker friend and FREE board member Leon Royer recently wrote: “Too many people (borrowers, bankers, investors and investment bankers) have done too many dumb things for this situation to be resolved without substantial pain disbursed over many folks. No optimistic happy talk will change the curing time; it’s likely measured in years.”

Economist Peter Linneman nailed it more harshly in “Making Sense of the Current Capital Markets Disarray.” He observed: “As for the idiots who lent (often without down payments or documents) to the idiots who bought speculative homes, they deserve to lose. People must understand this simple fact.”

Our pressing danger is not that many folks will go broke, but rather that opportunistic politicians will bail them out and insulate them from past and future folly. We need to find and support those who instead recognize the ecological question: “If correction is not swift, then what will follow?” The longer we wait for a correction, the more massive and painful their suffering — and ours — ultimately must be. That’s the way the world works.

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A parish without residents or Sunday services provokes envy in other clergy and puzzlement in lay people. Why should such a parish survive? In fact the churches of the City of London have been subject to repeated review in recent decades. Indeed, after the war a combination of lack of nerve and money, together with Modernist objections, meant that St Mary-le-Bow was nearly not rebuilt. Thankfully, wiser counsels prevailed.

A church such as St Mary-le-Bow has constantly to reinvent itself to reflect the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the culture in which it is embedded. It has to look smart because its constituency ? the financial world of the City ? is used to style almost as much as substance. It needs to direct its sense of the Gospel to those matters that help Christians to make connections between their faith and their work. And for the non-religious, St Mary-le-Bow must continue to assert that the flourishing life of the City of London requires pause, reflection and comment as much as relentless trade and entrepreneurial decision-making.

At St Mary-le-Bow there is today a community of worshippers who offer support and witness to one another, but equally prominent is a desire to minister effectively to institutions ? often the ancient and modern livery companies ? and to contribute to public debate. There is much that Christian wisdom has to say about fair trade, the environment, ethical investment and corporate social responsibility. St Mary-le-Bow encourages public debate from two pulpits ? a liturgical novelty in the postwar church and a tradition of dialogue which goes back to the 1960s, when the then rector wanted the church, innovatively, to communicate its message on the world’s own terms. Since the events of September 2001 in New York, there is today more then ever a powerful need for places where reasonable religion and open debate are espoused; after all, religion can now rock the markets.

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The struggle between preservation and extinction played out at a meeting of the Jersey City Historic Preservation Commission on Monday night.

The object of the struggle: St. John’s Episcopal Church at 120 Summit Ave., a few blocks from the old Jersey City Medical Center.

Earlier this year, a historic preservation group called the Jersey City Landmarks Conservancy had filed an application with the Preservation Commission, hoping the structure could get municipal landmark designation. The distinction would protect the building from demolition.

The Conservancy is concerned that the church will be eventually demolished by the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, which currently owns the building.

The Episcopal Diocese closed the church in 1994 after it had served the community for more than 100 years, complaining of a declining congregation and unnecessary costs to maintain it.

At Monday’s meeting, guests heard from a representative for the Landmarks Conservancy and a representative for the Episcopal Diocese.

After two and half hours, the meeting ended with no decision. Instead, the case will continue to be heard at a special meeting of the commission this coming Monday.

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This wonder is different in quality from contemplative wonder, which does not undo but lets be. It involves a conception of science that extends knowledge but admits its limits. Some things are beyond its comprehension and remain intrinsically mysterious. Consciousness, morality and existence itself are obvious candidates – the things that the artistic, religious and moral imagination are so well equipped to ponder.

This difference between intrinsic and contemplative wonder echoes a great divide in the history of science. When the pre-Socratic natural philosophers speculated about the nature of the world, they were contemplating the nature of the gods too: when Pythagoras discovered his theorem it seemed obvious to him to find an altar and sacrifice an ox.

This changed with Francis Bacon, the author of the modern scientific method. He believed that science has the empirical world at its fingertips. Moreover, he thought God had given man the right to unpick and exploit it. “The secrets of nature are better revealed under the torture of experiments than when they follow their natural course,” he wrote.

However, he also knew that this magisterium of experiment did not overlap with the magisterium of religion, which “extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value”, in Stephen Jay Gould’s famous formulation.

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“When it’s somebody under age 14, it is a crime and it must be reported,” Anderson said. “The health care provider has no discretion in the matter. It’s up to the district attorney to decide.”

Anderson said she contacted Portland officials after she learned that some employees of the health centers, which are operated by the city’s Public Health Division, believed they could decide whether a child’s sexual activity constituted criminal abuse.

In fact, if a child under age 14 was having consensual sex with someone of a similar age, health center employees weren’t reporting it to the proper authorities, said City Attorney Gary Wood.

Anderson said doctors and other health care providers in private practice may falsely believe they have similar leeway, but they must follow the same laws.

“It’s clear that it’s going on all the time,” Anderson said. “Either the law is going to be enforced or it needs to be changed. I don’t think a law should be routinely violated.”

Portland’s six school-based health centers had no formal policy on reporting sexual activity involving students under age 14, said Douglas Gardner, director of Portland’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Gardner said it’s unclear whether any health center employee failed to report suspected cases to the state Department of Health and Human Services, but they did fail to report cases to Anderson’s office.

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[Peter] SAGAL: A swingers club is in this particular case – and this, I think, is typical of a certain segment of what is called the lifestyle – is a private home that is opened up to carefully vetted couples – couples only – that’s capital C, capital O – for people to come.

This particular place, again, typical, is set up as a kind of private social club. There’s drinks, there’s dancing, there’s conversation. There’s gaming. You want to play poker, a strip poker, anything else. There was a backgammon set. You can hang out. You can be socially. You can be convivial(ph). You can drink your own liquor, of course, because there’s no liquor license. It’s a private accommodation. And…

[Scott] SIMON: And you bring your own bottle…

SAGAL: You bring your own bottle.

SIMON: Like it’s a paint party or something.

SAGAL: Exactly, which you mark with a (unintelligible). And then, if everybody is off a mind, you and anybody who can sense can go off into rooms reserved for the purpose and pursue what everything, anything you want to pursue. It is always understood that this happens with the consent and often participation or at least witnessing of your partner. It is very straightforward.

SIMON: They seem to make a point of separating sex and love.

SAGAL: That is…

SIMON: At least the kind of sex…

SAGAL: …an explicit point. I mean…

SIMON: Yeah.

SAGAL: …this has nothing to do with intimacy. You’re confusing sex with intimacy, said the owner of the club to me, and I – to which my response should have been, well, doesn’t everybody? I mean, isn’t sex intimacy? I mean, isn’t it in fact almost a synonym? And to them it is not.

In a weird way, emotional attachment must be the kind of social disease that can ruin all the good times going on. That would be my supposition. Nina Hartley, the world’s most articulate porn star, who I also talked about in the book…

SIMON: Yeah.

SAGAL: She maintains that the idea of sexual orientation is far, far more complicated than the way we usually mean it – straight or gay. She thinks that it applies to all kinds of different interests, abilities, lack of abilities, enthusiasms, immunities, and I certainly think that this is true of this particular scene, that you have to be of a particular mind. You have to be the kind of person who not only thinks of sex in a particular way but feels it in a particular way, or rather maybe more to the point it doesn’t feel in a particular way to enjoy the scene.

—NPR’s Peter Sagal during an interview about his new book The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them).

Is the Pentagon truly going to deploy an army of cultural relativists to Muslim nations in an effort to make the world a safer place?

A few weeks ago this newspaper reported on an experimental Pentagon “human terrain” program to embed anthropologists in combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan. It featured two military anthropologists: Tracy (last name withheld), a cultural translator viewed by American paratroopers as “a crucial new weapon” in counterinsurgency; and Montgomery McFate, who has taken her Yale doctorate into active duty in a media blitz to convince skeptical colleagues that the occupying forces should know more about the local cultural scene.

How have members of the anthropological profession reacted to the Pentagon’s new inclusion agenda? A group calling itself the Network of Concerned Anthropologists has called for a boycott and asked faculty members and students around the country to pledge not to contribute to counterinsurgency efforts. Their logic is clear: America is engaged in a brutal war of occupation; if you don’t support the mission then you shouldn’t support the troops. Understandably these concerned scholars don’t want to make it easier for the American military to conquer or pacify people who once trusted anthropologists. Nevertheless, I believe the pledge campaign is a way of shooting oneself in the foot.

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With the worst of the wildfires dying down, many Southern Californians lucky enough to find their homes still standing could nevertheless face hardships for weeks to come, including polluted air, no electricity and no drinking water.

Power lines are down in many burned-over areas, and the smoke and ash could irritate people’s lungs for as long as the blazes keep burning.

Randy and Aimee Powers returned to this mountain community in San Diego County on Friday to find their home without electricity or water, after fire trucks drained the town’s reservoir.

“It’s better to be at home. We’re going to stick it out and do whatever we have to do up here to survive. We’ll make it through,” said Randy Powers, who joined a half-mile-long car caravan on Ramona’s Aqua Lane.

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Update: There is a lot more here, including this:

The Rochester diocese serves 12,000 members and 52 congregations in upstate New York, where Lane has lived his entire life. The Maine diocese has 17,000 members and 67 congregations.

Lane and his wife, Gretchen, a special education teacher, expect to relocate to Maine in early April. The couple have three grown children and four grandchildren.

“I’m delighted that the convention was so clear about who they want as their next bishop,” Knudsen said after Lane’s election was announced shortly before noon. “Electing him on the first ballot is a clear signal that they are ready to begin their ministry with him.”

She was elected the first female bishop to serve the diocese in November 1997 on the fifth ballot. Knudsen succeeded the Right Rev. Edward C. Chalfant, who went on paid leave in April 1996 after it became public that he had an affair with an unmarried woman. The next month, the statewide Standing Committee asked Chalfant to resign when allegations were made of an abuse of power.

Knudsen will visit family in Europe and rest next fall, then do missionary work in Haiti, she said of her retirement plans.

A letter sent by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s describing his views over the ecclesiology of the Anglican Communion has provoked mixed reactions on both sides of the debate.

In the letter to the Rt Rev John W Howe, Bishop of Central Florida, (pictured) the Most Rev Rowan Williams said that the diocese, rather than the national church or the province, is the primary ecclesial entity within the Anglican Communion.

This view has angered many liberals in the United States who feel this undermines the position of The Episcopal Church. But observers are divided over the possible implications of the letter. In the meantime Lambeth Palace has issued a clarification stressing that the letter’s contents are simply restating the conventional understanding of ecclesiology and that it is not to be viewed as an ”˜ex cathedra’ utterance.

The Rev Richard Jenkins, Director of the Affirming Catholicism group within the Church of England, said the Archbishop had articulated a ”˜very authentic Catholic theology of the Church which places the centre of mission at the level of the diocese’.

“The diocese is the local church, it’s the ancient model and what the Church of England inherited and it’s what he’s trying to maintain, it’s not anything new.”

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Chile’s Catholic Church was seen as a light during the dark days of Augusto Pinochet’s regime.

That is when the church battled repression. Now, the first indictment of a priest in connection with human rights abuses has reopened old wounds.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Two months after the Rev. Lance Eden arrived as pastor of First Street United Methodist Church, Hurricane Katrina struck.

Mr. Eden, newly ordained, quickly picked up skills few in the pulpit typically need. He learned how to restore a church whose roof had been peeled off and whose bell tower had been knocked askew. He played host to hundreds of volunteers who came to gut and rebuild. And most recently ”” and reluctantly ”” he took on the role of developer.

“I’d rather be doing something else,” Mr. Eden said. “But when you hear stories like the Good Samaritan or about how Jesus walks into the temple and overturns the tables of the money-changers, it charges us as a church to make sure justice is done for all people.”

First Street’s community development corporation owns 28 properties in Central City, a neighborhood of candy-colored bungalows, and Mr. Eden said he would like to acquire 20 more for moderate- to low-income housing.

New Orleans’s patchy recovery has largely bypassed places where the working class and the poor lived, like Central City and the Lower Ninth Ward. Many former residents lack the means to return. Instead, churches and groups with religious affiliations, citing Scripture’s call to help the stranger and the neighbor, have taken on building affordable housing.

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Californians lost their homes in record numbers for a second straight quarter, figures released today show.

Foreclosures statewide were at an all-time high for the three months ended Sept. 30, after shattering a record level the previous quarter, the La Jolla firm DataQuick Information Services said.

Though the state’s foreclosure rate tops that of the 1990s real estate collapse, Los Angeles and Orange counties have fared better so far. Neither county has slipped to the foreclosure levels of the 1990s, although each saw a sharp increase from the previous quarter.

Third-quarter foreclosures statewide totaled 24,409, up nearly 40% from the second quarter. In the six Southern California counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura, there were 13,314 foreclosures, up from 1,960 in the third quarter of last year.

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Check them out.

The spirit of the Fall House of Bishops meeting in New Orleans was extraordinary. We heard clear statements ”“ not many questions, but clear statements, some of them confronting to be sure ”“ from several guests who are members of the Anglican Consultative Council. For me the presence and ministry of the Archbishop of Canterbury was a blessing. To hear him speak of the situation of his own ministry, and gently to challenge us in ours, is so different from reading about him through the press or even unpacking his own writing.

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“Values are insubstantial stuff, existing primarily in the imagination,” Allan Bloom wrote in “The Closing of the American Mind” (1987). During the Cold War, the language of “values”–in which beliefs about good and evil are deemed purely subjective–worked well for relativists and, not least, peaceniks, as Mr. Bloom explained. If the U.S. and the Soviet Union merely had different “values,” there was no real need for confrontation.

Such language now appears to be serving the same purpose in the culture war. After polling suggested that people who voted on the basis of “values” were key to President Bush’s 2004 re-election, members of what used to be known unambiguously as the Religious Right took to calling themselves “values voters.” The cultural left has understood this language shift as a sign that maybe we can all be friends.

Two weeks ago, Third Way, a self-described “strategy center for progressives,” released a document called “Come Let Us Reason Together: A Fresh Look at Shared Cultural Values Between Evangelicals and Progressives.” It amounted to a broad statement of principle signed by folks like Joel Hunter, a Florida mega-church pastor, David Gushee, a Christianity Today contributor, and other less-than-prominent progressives and evangelicals. Jill Pike, Third Way’s deputy director of public affairs, emailed me to say that, by trying to bridge the gap between the two groups, “we are not talking about compromising each other’s values but instead creating an approach that will inevitably lend itself to progress and change.” The statement itself asserts that the two groups want “the same protections, public benefits, and opportunities” for gays and lesbians. The signers also agree that, to reduce the incidence of abortion, young people need better access to contraception and more sex education. Well, at least evangelicals’ values weren’t compromised!

Posted in * Religion News & Commentary, Evangelicals, Other Churches

He also threw down a theological challenge on a doctrine that the worldwide Anglican Communion is threatening to split over.

In his sermon, he poked fun at the belief that only those who accept Jesus as their savior can enter heaven.

“Can you imagine that there are those who think God is a Christian?” he said to laughter from a mostly appreciative audience. “Can you tell us what God was before he was a Christian?”

More than 1,300 people crammed into lofty Calvary Episcopal Church, East Liberty, yesterday for the interfaith prayer service, part of the archbishop’s first visit here.

Jared Cohon, president of Carnegie Mellon University, noted the unusual setting for the secular universities to award their degree, but said the archbishop’s role in ending brutal segregation and working for reconciliation in South Africa made extraordinary gestures easy. He awarded the degree with Mark Nordenberg, chancellor at Pitt.

They were surrounded by religious leaders, from evangelical Presbyterians to Muslims to rabbis to Catholic Bishop David Zubik of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Bishop Robert Duncan of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh, a leader among theologically conservative Anglicans, also attended.

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Corporate America has made big strides toward the smoke-free workplace. Its next goal: the smoke-free worker.

Many businesses are seeking to reduce their medical bills by paying for programs to help employees stop smoking. A decade ago, such programs were rare. But recent surveys indicate that one-third of companies with at least 200 workers now offer smoking cessation as part of their employee benefits package. Among the nation’s biggest companies, the number may be nearly two-thirds of employers.

“Tobacco cessation has been the hot topic for the last year,” said Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, which includes more than 200 large employers.

The programs are yet another example, along with various other corporate wellness efforts like weight management and diabetes control, of how private employers are taking health care reform into their own hands, even as politicians continue to debate proposals and tactics in Washington and on the campaign trail.

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Last week, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York published a consultation paper in response to the Prime Minister’s proposal that the Prime Minister should no longer exercise any element of choice in recommending appointments to senior ecclesiastical posts. In future, the paper said, the Church would forward only one name to convey to the Queen when diocesan bishops are appointed.

The Archbishops are asking for responses to the paper to be sent by 7 December.*

In the selection of cathedral deans, the paper said that the Prime Minister’s Office would no longer lead the process of recommending a new dean. The paper recognised that a cathedral was the mother-church of the diocese, but that it is “the relationship with the bishop that is the defining characteristic of a cathedral. As a matter of principle it seems to us questionable whether, with the Prime Minister’s Office no longer in the lead, anyone other than the diocesan bishop should oversee the process.”

But, in their letter to The Times, John Arnold, Dean Emeritus of Durham, Richard Lewis, Dean Emeritus of Wells, and Edward Shotter, Dean Emeritus of Rochester, say that canon law laid down that deans were part of the government of the Church.

“Deans have been part of a system of checks and balances in the English Church, at least since the Reformation, when papal powers were divided between the Crown and the Archbishop of Canterbury,” they wrote.

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