JUST as there are seven great jokes, and seven perennial religious-affairs news stories (not counting the Good News of Jesus, of course), perhaps there are seven ages of Archbishops of Canterbury, although that might not quite be what Shakespeare had in mind.

Lord Carey has now reached the lean-and-slippered-pantaloon stage. As for Lord Williams, I hope his beard is still of formal cut (was it ever?), and he certainly remains full of wise saws and modern instances, even if not with fair round belly and good capon lined, unless the catering facilities at Magdalene are much improved.

Now, in media terms, Archbishop Welby is basking in the bubble reputation, even if he has not yet sought the cannon's (canon's?) mouth. Setting Shakespeare aside, he has got past the honeymoon stage, but has not, so far, reached the barmy-bishop phase, where everything he says is derided. It will come.

But, for now, the scratching around for religious stories in an August otherwise full of depressing foreign news resulted in the shocking revelation that, with everything else on his plate, he has decided not to become a patron of the RSPCA.

This was deemed a snub by The Times, which set its investigations editor, Dominic Kennedy no less, on the story. Perhaps Ruth Gledhill is on holiday. By the weekend, The Sunday Times's crack team of investigators had also discovered, horrors! that Welby had once, about a decade before he was ordained, while he was still an oil executive, gone on a pheasant shoot, and had not enjoyed it.

To illustrate its exclusive, it superimposed the Archbishop's head, complete with clerical collar - which, of course, he would not have been wearing at the time - on top of an anorak, cradling shotgun, and standing next to the largest pheasant in the world. I think it was meant as a joke, but you can never be quite sure.

All good fun, except, of course, that Lord Williams never quite lived down Gledhill's proposition that, as his poetry had been celebrated at an eisteddfod, he was therefore a pagan. One of the features of much News International reporting is its portentous humourlessness and lack of proportion (it is not unique in this, of course), which led Kennedy in The Times to speculate that Welby's decision not to join the RSPCA "will be seen by many as creating a moral vacuum at the top of the welfare charity".

Hmmm. "Seen by many"? How many do you think he asked? Or was this a case of what Gledhill herself once described to me as "pre-emptive speculation" i.e. a prediction which cannot otherwise be established. How consoling for the Archbishop that his absence from any organisation must inevitably leave a moral vacuum at its heart.

IT WAS left to another part of the News International stable to inject a note of seriousness to the issue - and I never thought I'd write that of The Sun.

The paper's veteran political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, had cheer for the Archbishop, who should frame the resulting article; for he may never receive its like again from such a source. The decision not to join the charity meant that the Church was back in safe hands, and that Archbishop Welby was the voice of common sense. Of course, Kavanagh had an ulterior motive in saying so, because, as we all know, most charities are hotbeds of leftie activism and political subversion. Just wait till the Archbishop praises one of them - still, it's good while it lasts.

AND then up popped Lord Williams, speaking at the Edinburgh Book Festival about the need for British Christians who claim to be persecuted to grow up. What they are really feeling is mildly uncomfortable, he told his audience, which doesn't begin to compare with real persecution in other parts of the world.

The story took a day or so to leach out, but got full play in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, the news-value being, I suppose, churchman says the bleedin' obvious. It was a rebuke, not least to his predecessor, who persists in spreading such nonsense under the weaselly guise of claiming that persecution is just what other people think.

Then Lord Williams issued a clarification in the Guardian's letters column. It wasn't like that at all, apparently: "I had in mind those who offer what I think unduly sensationalised accounts of the situation - and to a lesser extent those in the public eye who have to put up with a certain amount of routine attack."

Well, I think we can all be glad he made that clear. It's still the media's fault after all. Normal service resumes.