LET us start with the greatest absent comma in the history of religious journalism, spotted on the BBC news site by Private Eye: “The King is also well known for his fascination with other belief systems. He has long talked of his appreciation for the way people of different faiths, and none contribute to British society.”
One chance to contribute to British society was blown by Sabina Suey, a Spanish woman who was cleaning the cathedral in Valencia in 1939. The Times had a lovely story about her. Fearing that an agate cup, believed by the faithful to be the Holy Grail itself, would be plundered from the cathedral in the chaotic end times of the civil war, she took it home and stashed it inside her sofa. This can’t have been a terribly secret operation, because MI6 got to hear of it, and offered her and her family safe passage to the UK, if she would only bring the chalice with her. She turned them down, though, and the relic remains in the cathedral today.
There is one amusing twist to the story: the only MI6 agent I know to have been operating in Spain at the time was Kim Philby. He was also, of course, working for the Russians, but his cover story was that he was working for various right-wing English papers, such as The Times, on the fascist side.
He certainly had charm. Two of the most prominent English Christians of the late 20th century, Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene, both regarded him as a friend as well as a colleague in the Secret Service. Even my mother, who dealt with some of his work, had no hard words for him. But he was also a man who betrayed anyone who trusted him on a Johnsonian scale.
I love the thought that the Holy Grail, its custodian, and all her family might have been entrusted to such a man. In Hollywood, the relic would have burned his hands off. In reality, they’d have ended up in Leningrad, and then the gulag if they were lucky.
GOOD Communists must obviously lie for the cause. How much should Christians care that other Christians do?
Last week, Tim Farron, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats, seemed to suggest, in The Times, that the answer was, in practice, “not at all”: “Of course, there will be some fake conversions, and the Church should be alert to the fact that people do try to game the system. But who other than God can decide who has genuinely accepted Christ in their hearts and who has not?
“We should rejoice that some of the asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm barge are reported to have turned to Christ with the support of local churches. If we lazily assume these are all fake, we deny the power of the gospel message.”
It is an argument that casts light on his position as a former party leader.
Then there was an interview in The Times with the Revd Richard Coles, headlined “I lied to the church about my sex life”. I’m sure this is true; I also rather think he shouldn’t have done. Later in the interview, he says: “I felt sometimes like I was in the resistance and they were the Gestapo. I mean, I’m overstating it, but what I did feel is that they had no moral cause, so I didn’t feel that I had a moral obligation at all. And I’m not the first person to find themselves obliged to lie for institutional reasons in the Church of England.”
The interviewer, Andrew Billen, is not particularly sycophantic: “I had rather considered his church career a continuation of showbiz by other means, fuelled by his love of performance, camp and kitsch. . . To this outsider, the great obstacles to Coles’s ambitions to holiness would seem to be his ego, materialism and fondness for celebrity.”
The picture of the Church as a place where you have to lie to get on in the institution is not, I think, likely to promote Christianity, even if it is at least half true.
THE death of the Bishop of Buckingham, Dr Alan Wilson, came as a horrible shock. I liked him and greatly enjoyed his company, even if he was not always an entirely credible source.
Lots of journalists liked him, even without the bond of a shared sense of humour, and it’s worth thinking about why. He was not a rentaquote, for one thing. I never had the sense that he talked to get his name into papers — partly because much of his conversation about colleagues was unquotable, but mostly because he said things because he wanted them said. He would have been just as happy if someone else had got them into the papers.
Oddly enough, considering his positions in church politics, I think of him as a rather straightforward Evangelical officer type: straightforward, and with the confidence to tell you what he thought and the courage to act on it. He would have gone straight over the top at the Battle of Somme. He would not have survived.
The underlying secret of his attraction was that journalists felt that he liked us rather than used us. However sensible it is to fear and to distrust journalists, and however necessary any public figure may find it to lie to us, some of us do respond remarkably well to being treated like adult human beings.
