Lockdown-loving bishops, where is your remorse?
by Julian Mann, TCW:
THE egregious failure of the Church of England’s bishops to question, let alone resist, the Covid dictatorship must not be overlooked in the focus on the nasty careerist behaviour of politicians, spin doctors and civil servants revealed in the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files.
It was clear that the C of E’s leadership was already inclined to leftist bossiness when on March 24, 2020, the day after Boris Johnson announced the first national lockdown, the bishops wrote to clergy telling them to close all church buildings.
In the dark days of the lockdown in January 2021 when the government placed children under house arrest (or high-rise flat arrest for many) and prevented them from going to school for two months, churches were allowed to continue socially distanced Sunday worship with mask-wearing mandatory and congregational singing banned. Still, the C of E virtue-signalled its lockdown zeal, boasting in a press release that more than half of its 12,500 parishes had decided to keep their buildings closed.
Certainly the government put churches of all denominations in an impossible position. The consequences of disobeying the rules could be police raids and worshippers fined. But why did the bishops not encourage all their parish clergy to get Sunday worship going again as soon as they could in July 2020? Why did they not unite to speak out against the draconian rules requiring mask-wearing in churches and preventing congregational singing? Why did they not speak out against the abusive confinement of children during the lockdowns?
In April 2021, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, admitted to the Financial Times that the strict closure of churches in 2020 had been a mistake: ‘I got quite a few things wrong at the beginning and I learnt quite quickly. I didn’t push hard enough to keep churches available for at least individual prayer in the first lockdown. We also said clergy couldn’t go in, and personally I feel I made a mistake with that . . . I can make all kinds of excuses. I still think I was too risk-averse.’
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