The £ in their cassocks…
Anybody fancy a quick hand of asset strip poker?
Blimey, you turn your back for five minutes and the world changes irrevocably.
The Baptist Church, the Bible Society and the Church of England are in agreement. Holding hands, happy clapping together, lifting their skirts and dancing a merry two step in perfect formation.
Not on homosexuality, or whether God exists, or women bishops or anything minor like that, but they are all singing from the same hymn sheet on a matter dear to their hearts.
Mammon to be precise.
It seems you can serve two masters, God and Mammon, after all. Nay, they reserve the right to do so, demand to do so. Hallelujah.
Into the money-lenders tent they pile, a mere six months after the Archbishop of Canterbury, dear little woolly Rowan Atkinson or whoever he was, said:
The urgent larger issues raised by the protesters at St Paul’s remain very much on the table and we need – as a Church and as society as a whole – to work to make sure that they are properly addressed.
Now before #occupylsx get too excited and assume that the Church in whose crypt they crapped is suggesting sharing its money with the 99%, I must point out that these various religious leaders and worthy charities are only advocating a ‘fair shares for all’ approach in very specific circumstances.
Having ‘resolved’ in a series of late night get togethers over the Christmas raffle Sherry bottle, to go forth with a common purpose, they have come out fighting this morning on tablets of stone.
They called for action against large bonuses at the top of major companies, urging investors to use shareholder meetings to vote against unfair pay schemes at firms in which they hold a stake.
Such concern for the starving widows and orphans whose worldly goods are tied up in these companies! Like I said, don’t get too excited. On closer inspection we see that it is not actually the church itself which is advocating fair shares for all – but a consortium of trustees of church funds.
A group of leading charity investors, including the managers of the Church’s £5 billion portfolio of property and investments, said soaring salaries and bonuses demonstrated a “wider malaise” in corporate life.
The ‘wider malaise’ turns out to be not starving widows and orphans, but shareholding Church trustees:
“We are concerned that rewards to executives have been rising out of proportion to rewards to shareholders who own these companies and whose investments are at risk.
“As shareholders, we have rights to contribute to the governance of companies in which we are invested. We believe it is our duty to use these rights.”
Good to see that the Church of England, having plundered the assets of the Church of Rome, is concerned that the money lenders and money launderers in the City aren’t giving them their fair share of usury.
Now that they’ve figured out how to come to agreement on protecting the pound in their cassocks, perhaps they might like to turn their attention to some of the other less pressing moral dilemmas that face us?
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April 19, 2012 at 15:18 -
Welcome back. Hope you had a nice break.
It’s nice to see the Church with their billions finally getting round to doing what they should have already been doing as shareholders. Better late than never.
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April 19, 2012 at 15:32 -
Welcome back, indeed. Some of us were getting seriously worried since there was not a word left behind. And your ‘about/contact’ page disappeared into a 404 error (still is).
So nice to see your name pop up in my RSS feed today.
As to this post – in an earlier life I used to audit the accounts of one of the major branches of the Anglican church and was unhappy at what I saw, to put it as charitably as I can. -
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April 19, 2012 at 15:55 -
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April 20, 2012 at 10:11 -
That is definitely going to be my word of the week!
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April 19, 2012 at 16:55 -
Boom Shanka.
Glad to have you back.
Now does anyone know where woman on a raft is ?
Regards, Tadge
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April 19, 2012 at 18:12 -
Commented at mine just today, and put up a great little piece on Cornish plays at her own blog a day or so ago.
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April 19, 2012 at 22:56 -
I’m skiving. Like Mr Pepys, I’ve been to the theatre often. Unlike Mr Pepys, I’ve had a whale of a time. We are living in the very best country in the entire world for live drama. Even the amateur productions (which I adore) are well above a standard which was once the preserve of the West End.
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April 19, 2012 at 17:47 -
Haw dare you go AWOL! Welcome back.
I couldn’t agree more with the piece. Every so often I pull the leg of the local Rector (a friend and neighbour) re. the dissolution of the monasteries:
“D’you suppose it’s a gang of embittered Romans who nicked the lead off the church roof? After all, they think it’s theirs to take…”
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April 19, 2012 at 18:11 -
Good to see you back in the saddle
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April 19, 2012 at 18:44 -
Anna! You’re back! Thank goodness – we [I] have been in limbo …
(-:-) am attempt at creating a hugging emoticon … -
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April 19, 2012 at 18:51 -
Welcome back!
Emerging from Sevenoaks railway station, there was directly opposite a great, thriving pub, holding many regular local club events and with good food & rooms for weary travellers. Unfortunately the freehold belonged to the Church Commissioners, who decided to capitalise on their investment by selling the plot for office & flat developments (of which there was already a glut in the area). Planning meetings were deliberately held far away – the final one was in Bristol – to stifle the huge protests at this intended desecration; all to no avail, as the sale went ahead. This all occured just before the recession – it was demolished and there is still a large hole in the ground surrounded by decaying board-fencing. The view is depressing – anyone new arriving by rail must wonder what sort of shithole they’ve reached.
For me, this sums up the naked greed of these good Christian folk.-
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April 20, 2012 at 12:53 -
It’s not just the church who can cock things up. Just look at Bradford where there is a hole in the ground right in the centre where the council promised that a shopping centre would be built.
You know how councils and other large organisations are, they like to plan everything to last the detail (mostly tick boxes on paper) – but then forget the big picture. In the case of Bradford a recession and the lack of a developer willing and able to build the shopping centre.
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April 19, 2012 at 19:09 -
Good to see you back Mrs R.
Until Cramner gives a definitive answer, I would disagree that the CofE “plundered” the assets of the Church of Rome. The CofE merely took over the franchise of the established church in England in a corporate rebranding exercise to ensure that the English church favoured English interests instead of those of foreigners. By all means do as the Romans do in Rome, but why in London as well. In a way, Henry VIII was the first Eurosceptic who, if he were alive today, would order the representatives of the EU, the ECHR and foreign-owned utilities in England to be beheaded and spiked as a warning to other traitors and their organisations’ functions transferred to English owned and run agencies.-
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April 19, 2012 at 21:13 -
Brian, I think it was Elizabeth 1 that told the Europeans to get knotted in no uncertain terms.
Tis a pity the present Elizabeth didn’t tell the PM what to do about Europe.
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April 19, 2012 at 21:43 -
In the current climate I’m not sure if I’d call half the Grade I listed buildings in the country an ‘asset’, just having had an extra £10m a year slapped on the maintenance costs in the budget
.Answering the question in the absence of Cranmer, the Church Commissioner assets (80% being part of the staff pension fund) are substantially from Queen Anne’s Bounty (look it up) and historic landed parish church assets such as Glebe.
There’s not very much little ‘asset stripped from Rome’ stuff in the CC assets – the lands confiscated by Henry VIII from the Monasteries went into endowing, for example, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, bribing nobles, that sort of thing.
The whole Chancel Tax fandango has its roots in Henry VIII taking away assets and the maintenance costs for which the land was responsible staying with it.
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April 20, 2012 at 05:25 -
I have to say, I’ve never thought of Henry VIII as the Romano-sceptic and tortured soul, pondering if Latin mass was truly god’s will. Perhaps more the self-interested greedy tosser and murderous theiving tyrant who would use any excuse to dispose of an inconvenient wife to get to grips with the lovely Mistress Boleyn. If someone from Mecca had been visiting court at the time, I’d bet a large proportion of us would now be saying Allah Akbar.
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April 19, 2012 at 19:42 -
Welcome back! Loved Brian’s comment. I never thought of Henry VIII that way before, but I like it and had a good chuckle. If Henry were alive today….if only!
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April 19, 2012 at 21:44 -
Good to have you back – not that we were at all worried, of course……..
It seems a tad unbalanced of the CofE to be complaining about any facet of life in Britain when 26 of its own senior managers occupy unelected seats in our legislature. Clearly, they are proving incapable of using that influence to effect the changes the believe necessary, therefore should resign those seats immediately, enabling them to campaign freely from the outside, just like any other organisation has to do.
Until the House of Lords is emptied of those cassocked classes, it and they will never enjoy legitimacy in my view.
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April 19, 2012 at 21:46 -
The comments on the Telegraph piece show a glorious variety of unthough-out anti-church prejudice.
Brilliant.
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April 19, 2012 at 22:04 -
Phew – the bar’s open again! That’s good – I was getting a bit parched.
P.S. – hope all is well with the landlady and her nearest and dearest.Complicated old business, Church finances. Many of the Church’s ‘assets’ are tied up with all sorts of covenants and restrictions, and they do have a bit of an ongoing maintenance problem with some of them. On the other hand, the Church’s hired helps do seem somewhat rapacious in exploiting some of their ‘estate’. My barber of many years rents his tiny shop from the Church Commissioners, and a greedier bunch of grabbers it would be harder to find, by his reckoning. Can’t help feeling the Church would have been better off sticking to ministering to their flock rather than dipping into the property game, but I suppose you can’t blame the current generation for what they inherited.
Mind you, lecturing the rest of us on financial matters whilst exploiting their assets for all they’re worth does seem a tad tricky to justify.
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April 19, 2012 at 22:26 -
Good to have you back! I was quite bereft for a while there!!
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April 19, 2012 at 23:51 -
Glad to have you back Anna, was getting worried there for a while.
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April 20, 2012 at 10:06 -
Phweeeew! I’ve been holding my breath for what seems like forever. Welcome back.
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April 20, 2012 at 10:19 -
Welcome back – there was an uncomfortable draught whistling through that gaping hole in the blogosphere.
Is there, I wonder, a public record of the salaries and bonuses received by ‘the managers of the Church’s £5 billion portfolio of property and investments’ themselves?
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April 20, 2012 at 11:29 -
Welcome back indeed!
G the M
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