Poor Mrs “obioma Elechi”, widowed and made destitute by those rampaging Muslims. Her home and butchery business have been destroyed, and she is presently “and taking shelter from local shade made of palm leave over wood, which is submerged with flood whenever it rains”

Amazing palm trees in Nigeria: everyone wired for broadband so Mrs Elechi can email me with a plea for a “benign devotion” to “feed my (yawning) kids”.

Go into business selling broadband access, Mrs Elechi.

Today the Pope will issue a pastoral letter on the seemingly never-ending sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic church in Ireland.

As part of his preparation in writing the letter, last month the Pope summoned the bishops of Ireland to the Vatican for a meeting to discuss the allegations, the convictions, the cover-ups and the attitudes that led to such a sorry state of affairs.

The meeting did not go well, but not for any reasons you might have thought. There was little sense of shame, or contrition, or repentance, or reconciliation reported in the media, secular or catholic. Instead, The Tablet reported that a number of bishops were angered by the ceremonial formality of the meeting:

The Bishop of Killaloe, Dr Willie Walsh, said people in Ireland had been “rightly angry at the apparent pomp and ceremony and the kissing of the Pope’s ring” by bishops when they greeted Benedict XVI.¹

Really, Dr Walsh? Were the people of Ireland really angry that the Vatican palace is a formal and ritualised place? Were the laity of Killaloe pained on behalf of your hurt amour-propre? Was diplomatic and ecclesiastical protocol the major issue of the meeting? Tell me, Dr Walsh, how is life in the eighteenth century?

This was a meeting at which the chief pastors of a church, having utterly forgotten their responsibilities to pastor and care for the most vulnerable and trusting, were to be called to account. And you didn’t like the seating plan.

It seems that there are bishops, in all churches, who are men of strong and certain principles, chief of which is they are a very senior and important people², and should be treated as such. A friend of mine, who once trained baby cathedral clergy, told them the greatest challenge they faced in their ministry was the confusion between working in a big and important building and thinking themselves to be big and important people. Willie Walsh (obviously distracted by the BA strike) has succumbed.

Today the Pope will issue his pastoral letter. What’s the betting some big and important bishops will complain about the typeface?

1. ‘Vatican formalities anger hostile Ireland’, The Tablet, 13 March 2010, p. 42 [↩]
2. h/t Clayboy [↩]

On my way to Swanwick to speak to the Southwark Diocesan Clergy Conference on the wonders and delights of blogging for fun and profit (actually, the use of blogging for pastoral care and education). Shall I tell them that London Diocese has positioned tanks on Tower Bridge?

In what way is Greenbelt like heaven?

You end up meeting all kinds of friends in unexpected circumstances.

To that end I have shared a Cumberland Sausage (cheap and good), a pint of beer (good and expensive), and a beer-garden hymn sing (bizarre and… bizarre) with Sam Norton.

Good beer, good food and good friends. The only difference between Greenbelt and heaven is the nearer presence of the Lord.

“Anything that is worth believing in goes beyond the available evidence.”

Alister McGrath

An email received today from Church House Bookshop:

Exclusive Special Offer – Today Only!

Today only, until midnight (BST) on Thursday 9 July, Church House Bookshop are offering the following recently published titles at specially reduced prices:

If You Meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him
- was ?14.99, now only ?13.50 (www.chbookshop.co.uk/2411995)

I love the question marks!

Ronald Reagan said that “A recession is when your neighbour loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.” The reasons why you are losing your job, or your neighbour is losing his, are never as easy to understand as Reagan’s knockabout political abuse seems to pretend.

Why are we mired in such financial and economic turmoil?

In the UK we are fortunate to have Evan Davis and Robert Peston to explain the ins and outs of the credit crunch to us. In the Church of England we have been fortunate to have Andreas Whittam Smith, First Church Estates Commissioner, explain the ins and outs of the credit crunch to the General Synod. Exemplary as all these explanations are and have been, I have yet to come across anything so elegant, so simple and so terrifying as Jonathan Jarvis’s The Crisis of Credit Visualized:

From The Guardian this morning:

If you meet a shark …

• Keep your eye on the shark at all times. Sharks may retreat temporarily and then try to sneak up on you

I can’t tell you how much I needed to be told that. It would be so very easy to be distracted by something else in the event of being attacked by a 16 foot Great White shark.

I am distressed to learn of Richard Wright’s death today. One problem with listening to Pink Floyd’s music, and the massive contribution made to it by Wright’s fine keyboard playing, is that it is so familiar (at least to people of a certain age); we just don’t hear it any more— we only recall hearing it, remembering where we were and who we were with the first time someone played, for example, The Great Gig in the Sky.

Wright was central to the genius of Floyd. It was his fluid, lyrical and melodic keyboard parts that added the wistfulness to the hard-edged anomie of Roger Waters’s music and lyrics.

Richard Wright, the poet of alienation and wonder, requiescat in pace.

From the BBC’s website

Princess Anne’s son, Peter Phillips, is to marry Canadian management consultant Autumn Kelly at Windsor Castle later.

The couple, both 30, who met while working at the 2003 Canadian Grand Prix, will exchange vows at the Berkshire castle’s St George’s Chapel.

Miss Kelly has given up her Catholic faith to allow her fiance to retain his place as 11th in line to the throne.

Well, I suppose if Paris was worth a mass then Windsor is worth a matins.