The enemy within

The arrest of two priests in Eastbourne on Tuesday highlights a growing issue for the place of the Gospel in public life.

Many Christians will have applauded the Cardinal Keith O'Brien's statement about Marriage over the weekend. But scroll down the responses to online articles, and you will find a huge amount of hostility. And not just the usual, and often orchestrated, response from gay lobby groups. There is a growing groundswell of opinion that the Church has lost all its moral authority to comment on these things because of the rank hypocrisy it has displayed over child sex abuse in recent years.

Admittedly, the Anglican church has reacted better to revelations of scandal than the Roman Church, whose cover ups have been its undoing in the US and Ireland in particular. The Anglican hierarchy has had the sense and courage to deal more openly and decisively when these things have come to the fore. Let us pray that they do the same with this developing story.

Scandals of ministers involved in immorality will be with us all the time. They will always be shocking. They will always be unexpected. They will always leave us thinking : "How could this have happened?" And they will continue happening despite all our best efforts to be CRB'd, mentored and accountable to each other. Because, as the proverb says, it is the human heart that is deceitful and wicked above all things. It will find ways of wriggling through the cracks of the barriers we put in the way.

Scandals like this, in God's goodness, should spur us on to renew our efforts at getting our structures accountable. But it should also spur us on to examine our own hearts afresh, and to ask how we are contributing to the growing view that the church is just "a bunch of hypocrites".