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.”
perhaps they should all have thrown toys at him and then organised a knees up at the Irish embassy?
Oh RPP, that’s not very kind, but it is very funny!
let’s hope we get a faithful bishop to replace him
3 was just as rude….but just as fitting!! ; )
Maybe the new man will get some decent vestments and replace those ghastly candlesticks.
As always, it’s a pleasure when some Brits venture comments about a fellow Brit on this blog. You gotta love British humour.
Would it be fair to say that +Butler was the most outspoken, partisan, strident liberal among the English bishops? That’s certainly been this American’s impression.
David Handy+
#6 Rev Handy
Thank you for spelling ‘humour’ correctly. +Tom Butler will be greatly missed for his ministry of feeding the hungry in the refreshment rooms of the House of Lords and providing thoughts for the day to the BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ Programme.
And for the Southwark Missal; the Southwark Pilgrimage; and The Bishop’s Tale
We shall not see his like again, hopefully.
There are a considerable number of vacant sees at the moment and coming up, including of course, Rochester and Chelmsford and Southwark. A changing of the guard: it remains to be seen in what direction. Perhaps they are all being saved up at the behest of all those American women in WATCH [Maltby, Rees, McCord-Adams] or the English ones [Winkett -who has written some drivel for Lent, etc etc], or a change of government?
RPP can’t help himself – it’s what he does. I do hope ex-Bishop Tom was driven off to his Guinness reception in a Mercedes.
#8: Interesting thought, tho’ I don’t think even the English will keep these posts vacant for 2 years. Some of those right-on liberal evangelical blogging clerics will probably be shoehorned in. It won’t stop the inexorable decline of English Anglicanism, as none of them really know how to make churches grow – and certainly not liberal American academics. Ex-Bishop Tom, OTOH, worked hard to close growing churches in his diocese.
I’ve always thought throwing toys out of car windows was an appropriate thing to be doing.