The debate on Britain’s membership of the European Union reflects a loss of confidence, and is testing the goodwill of other members who are growing frustrated with it, the Bishop in Europe, Dr Robert Innes, said this week.
Speaking on Tuesday, after the Prime Minister’s announcement last Friday that the referendum on EU membership would take place on 23 June, Dr Innes said that he would be “very sad” if the vote favoured Brexit.
“We British inherit a huge stock of goodwill towards us but I am aware that that goodwill is being used up,” Dr Innes said on Wednesday. “At a time when Europe has some huge issues to deal with, people have been a little frustrated that Britain has actually used a huge amount of the time of its leadership in dealing with what seem to some rather small issues that only pertain to one country.”
He was “saddened”, he said, “that the debate seems to reflect a loss of confidence in Britain in dealing with our European compatriots and neighbours. We are a big player. . . I’d like to see us be a leader.”
Two days in a row this site has left me wondering if what I am reading is genuine or a spoof. Here, for example, we see Bishop Pete Broadbent fulminating about the referendum being held at all and saying it is all because of Conservative Party tensions. No coincidence, then, that Broadbent himself is a former Labour Party borough councillor. It shows.
Then there is this gem:
The Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, Dr Jonathan Chaplin, warned this month of the “near-complete silence of English-speaking political theologians on the EUâ€. This had “left the present generation of Christians, now tasked with participating in the most important constitutional decision for a generation, theologically under-resourced and inarticulateâ€.
Let us pass over the conundrum of whether a political theologian is a contradiction in terms. Instead we wonder in amazement at this assertion that Christians in the UK, poor boobies, have been left without instruction and thus are inarticulate. All because the theologians have not told them what to think.
Breathtaking, isn’t it? I do not believe that there is a Christian choice here. You can be Christian and vote to stay in the EU and you can be Christian and vote to leave. But I do think that this kind of patronising twaddle is the kind of thing that would make people want to leave.
It is the purple haze, Fr Tee. It descends like a mist upon those in our church consecrated to the episopate. It encourages them to send forth daily missives for our education, instruction and reproof by the instruments set aside for their use: twitter, facebook and bloggery; so that we may never be without our wise and opinionated bishops’ instructions on what to think, what to do and how to vote.
The purple haze goes before them as a fog to envelope us by day and a blanket of darkness to overwhelm us by night. Like a sea of verbiage it washes all before it so that we miserable offenders and unworthy CofE pewsitters may be made aware of our place and grateful for the unremitting chastisement of our betters in their bishops’ and archbishops’ palaces. It is our penance and our purgatory for being members of the Church of England.