Since Hume’s death, a shabby terrace house in a Pimlico square has been slowly sucking the authority out of Archbishop’s House, Westminster, and every other bishop’s office. Number 39 Eccleston Square is the headquarters of the Bishops’ Conference Secretariat, which makes it sound like a mini-Vatican, with whispering monsignori gliding down its corridors. In fact, this particular curia is more like a local authority, full of beetling busybodies promulgating anti-racist directives. “We had enough Labour members to form our own branch,” says one ex-employee.
These bureaucrats justify their presence with a stream of documents and press releases; most of these carry the episcopal stamp and are reported in the media as the views of the Church. In practice, the 33 bishops have little opportunity to read these controversial pronouncements at draft stage. Take, for example, Feburary’s report, Taxation for the Common Good, which portrays high taxes as “a sign of social health and a moral good”. One senior bishop has complained that he was given no opportunity to read it beforehand; instead, he was pressured into supporting a tax policy well to the Left of Labour.
This is not to say that most bishops would not have agreed with its conclusions. Basil Hume was the most recent English Catholic prelate one could have imagined voting Tory (though never for Mrs Thatcher); these days, bishops are recruited from the ranks of priests who have served time in Eccleston Square and reflect its prejudices: pro-taxation, anti-private enterprise, pro-EU, anti-Israel, anti-American. Foreign policy has become one of the major preoccupations of the bishops, whose foreign affairs adviser, Fr Frank Turner, takes a polemical liberal position on just about everything. (It was he who bounced the bishops into supporting the draft EU constitution, even though it fails to mention God.)
This paragraph fascinated me:
This is what happens when Churches decline. According to sociologists, one of the first things a denomination does when it loses confidence in the transcendent power of its supernatural claims is to set up semi-secular “agencies” to ingratiate itself with its critics.
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