Astonishing attack from Justin Welby, the increasingly irrelevant Archbishop of Canterbury, on the BBC, saying that the C of E and Catholic Churches have done a much better job in responding to child abuse within their organisations than the BBC. And then going on about how shocked he is about gender pay differentials in the BBC.
WTF? None of these organisations can hold their heads up high on this issue, but seriously, the churches have done a good job? Decades, probably centuries, of abuse on a massive scale met with years of denial and evasion, and the explicit organisational protection of abusers, with scandals still emerging, compared to single figures of abusers (of course there may be more) who should have been identified and stopped earlier.
At least the BBC lets women do the same jobs as men, even if they don’t pay as much. How many female catholic priests are there? The argument about ordination of women is far from dead in the C of E, some bloke on the wireless the other day quoting Corinthians to show that women not only should not be vicars but should be silent in church.
So what’s behind this? My guess is it’s part of Welby’s ongoing whine about aggressive atheism. The BBC, clearly part of the intellectual metropolitan elite, has cut religious broadcasting, and is part of the media which delights in exposing Church scandals and abuses. Of course at the root is his probably unconscious knowledge that he has no arguments against the secularists. An institution which has had centuries of deference, privilege and absence of challenge, gleefully persecuting those with different opinions, can’t cope with a debate.