Fergus Butler-Gallie

On 21 July 1828, the urbane aristocrat Charles Manners-Sutton, 89th Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Just two and a half weeks later, on 8 August, the mild-mannered linguistic scholar William Howley was elected as his successor. The efficiency of this process is in marked contrast to the current search to find the next successor to Manners-Sutton and Howley. Justin Welby announced he was vacating the throne of St Augustine on 12 November last year; it took until 28 May even to assemble the committee who will discuss the names of his potential successor. It will be a miracle if we know the name of the new Primate of All England by the autumn.

Lent did not, I confess, start well. Cheltenham fell in its first week, and the Gold Cup is hardly the place for the rigours of Lenten discipline to begin. Some might say it is hardly the place for a clergyman at all. Peter Hitchens once commented on my clerical collar – stiff, crisp, linen – and said that if he saw a man wearing such a get-up at a racecourse he would assume he was an illegal bookmaker in disguise. Still, I recall that one of the most successful owner-breeders of all time was a clergyman. The vicar of Ashby de la Launde, the Revd J.W. King, won the Oaks, 1,000 Guineas and St Leger with his horse, Apology. There were, as the Bible tells us, giants in the earth in those days.

The Church of England is flogging off Dick Whittington. No, this isn’t an innuendo or a twist from a pantomime, but reality. The burial place of the mayor and cat enthusiast, St Michael Paternoster Royal, is being sold off as an office. The people behind this act are the Diocese of London, who bought you the Martin Sargeant scandal, which saw a church official jailed for five years after he managed to defraud the London Diocesan Fund of £5 million undetected. The Diocese of London is now a byword for the worst excesses of the culture which is slowly killing the Church The Diocese of London is now, in Church of England circles, a byword for the worst excesses of the culture which is slowly killing the Church.

Received wisdom suggests that you would not expect a vicar to disrupt Divine Worship. Now, anybody who’s worked with the clergy up close will know that in this case, as in so many areas, received wisdom is wrong. Still, there was shock in news outlets and on social media this week when a gaggle of Christians, including clerics, disrupted Evensong at Chichester in the name of climate action.  Those clergy involved think they’re the children of the revolution when actually they’re the Primrose League Their general propensity for mischief aside, there should be absolutely no surprise at all that clergy were involved in this very particular protest. Clerics are predominately older and predominately middle class.

Uzeste contains 387 people and a dead pope. The tiny French village is one of the less glamorous papal resting places, where the earthly remnants of the unfortunate Clement V await the General Resurrection. How much of Clement is left is hard to tell. As his body lay in state after he died in 1314, the church was struck by lightning, causing a fire that consumed his corpse. The medieval mind assumed that this was an earthly metaphor for the eternal flames that consumed Clement in Hell. Many identify this unfortunate pontiff as the first victim of the Curse of de Molay. Clement, a particularly craven occupant of the see of Peter, had moved the papacy to Avignon on the orders of the French king Philip IV, who then proceeded to co-opt him into his campaign against the Templar Order.

It was exceptionally cold, that strange Armistice day. I was used to spending the two minutes silence squinting into the winter brightness at college memorials or in English country church yards. Mid November is rarely freezing cold in the UK: it is often cold and crisp, the temperature is just enough time to stand outside whilst sunlight dances on stone memorials. Prague, however, where I spent that strange Armistice day a decade ago, is very different. Eleventh November is the feast day of St Martin of Tours, the patron saint of soldiers and the Czechs have a saying which alludes to the typical Central European weather on Armistice day: ‘St Martin comes riding a white horse’.  Snow did indeed fall that day.

They say that shopping centres are the cathedrals of late capitalism. It is amusing sometimes to think of future generations shuffling reverently around the monumental structures of glass, faux marble and strangely treated wood as if they were structures worthy of awe or wonder, perhaps pausing to peer at the tracery of a former Burger King. Westfield, London’s great temple that looms over Shepherd’s Bush, is an example of this genre I find particularly stressful. It is an endless cavalcade of stimuli: flashing adverts, muzak ricocheting off intensely polished surfaces, bright lights and endless, endless stuff to buy. We are not even spared olfactory assault, as the artificially intensified scents of everything from soaps to cinnamon buns are pumped into our nostrils.