After the resignation of its dean, St Paul’s must negotiate a peaceful settlement with the protesters, as quickly as possible, Andrew brown writes in his blog at The Guardian today.
The resignation of the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, Graeme Knowles, has landed responsibility for the crisis with the bishop of London, Richard Chartres. If the dean’s sacrifice is not to be in vain, the bishop must reverse his policy within the next 24 hours, and preferably by tomorrow morning. The alternatives are very much worse.
The bishop has a simple choice. Either he plans to throw all the protesters out, or he acquiesces in the presence of some sort of camp right outside his front door for the indefinite future. The lawyers, and perhaps the health-and-safety people, believe he must expel the protesters. The rest of the church sees clearly that this would be wrong in principle, and hugely damaging to the reputation of Christianity.
There’s no tidy way out of this, but there is a wrong one, which is to continue digging the grave Knowles had with such effort prepared for the Church of England’s reputation. The bishop will have to defy his own lawyers and negotiate a peaceful settlement with the protesters. Since he must do this, he had best do it at once. To wait for a week and then change his mind would be nearly as disastrous as settling for expulsion.
This won’t be easy. Early signs are that the bishop thinks it can still be fudged. At this afternoon’s press conference he said: “The last thing chapter would condone is use of violence in enforcing court orders.” But a court order expelling the protesters cannot be executed without force, and at the very least the possibility of violence.
Chartres is a man who believes in the establishment, in both senses, through and through. He’s profoundly conservative. He believes in the prayer book and the monarchy. His wife’s family is rich. But he is also a realist and a shrewd politician, and he knows that the dean’s cause is lost, and his policy has been rejected by almost all shades of Christian opinion as well as by the country as a whole.
Even if the dean had come to see that his policy was disastrous – and I think he must have done, or he would not have resigned – he could not have been the man to change it. Deans and chapters run their cathedrals constitutionally independently of their bishops. By the almost unprecedented step of calling on the bishop of London for advice after the dean’s resignation, the chapter – which we know was divided over policy – has taken the only opportunity available to it to come to terms with the protesters. It must not be fluffed.
The criticism of St Paul’s in the last week has been almost unanimous, and has ranged across the whole spectrum of opinion within the Church of England. Some has come from people who could never be described as left wing, like the last archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey.
The most remarkable critic was Ken Costa, the hugely rich banker who bankrolled the evangelical Alpha Course. Writing in Saturday’s Financial Times he said: “I have been in the City since before the Big Bang whose 25th anniversary came this week. I have been through several recessions but I cannot recall the underlying sustained anger across all social levels – from dinner parties to demonstrations – aimed at bankers and the market economy as a whole.
“When such a wide range of people are singing a tune perhaps discordant to a City worker’s ears but seemingly in tune with the global view that the market economy has failed to deliver growth, jobs and hope, we need to listen. The cure is not more legislation, or increased regulation. It is the pressing need to reconnect the financial with the ethical.”
This need to reconnect the financial with the ethical is precisely the cause on which the protesters and the chapter of St Paul’s are united, even when they disagree. It would be an act of insane folly if the Church of England were to disconnect them once again, and to take the side of money against ethics. But that is what the bishop of London will be seen to do if his policy doesn’t change right now.