Two Bishops Of Worcester

Today is the feast of St. Wulfstan, last Anglo-Saxon Bishop of Worcester, who rebuilt St Oswald's cathedral.

Wulfstan was an early anti-slavery campaigner, preaching in Bristol against the selling of English slaves to the Norse in Ireland and stopping the Bristol trade for a while (admittedly only after a slaver who continued to trade was seized by a mob and had his eyes put out).

He was also noted for his piety - once slapping the face of an eleventh-century groupie in front of the altar during a service - an act which gained widespread approval rather than accusations of domestic violence.

The current Bishop of Worcester, Peter Selby, has improved on this tradition, abandoning an old-fashioned Biblical theology for a Guardian-based one. While the Commandments are broken on an industrial scale in his diocese, the good shepherd concentrates on the issues that really matter to his flock - Third World debt, women bishops, the Iraq war, asylum seekers, our overcrowded prisons and the hideous oppression of gay clergy.

When a threatened prosecution against a UK-based gay website for linking to James Kirkup's notorious and blasphemous (and crap) poem on Christ was dropped, the Bishop was first to cheer.

The Rt Rev’d Professor Peter Selby, the Bishop of Worcester, stated that:

‘It was hard to believe that there was ever a case for this investigation, let alone for a prosecution. This whole event comes across as yet another example of the continuous harassment of lesbian and gay people. No moral cause can possibly be advanced by avoiding honest attention to people’s experience and the valuing of their gifts and resorting instead to promoting the fear which love is supposed to cast out’.

If you really wish you can follow the link to find the poem, hosted overseas. It surprises me that the Bishop considers necrophiliac activity with Our Lord to be 'people's experience' and that writing about it is 'honest attention' - but what do I know ?

St Wulfstan is currently rotating at 3,800 rpm.