The other day, a woman
complained to a local newspaper about the decline of the UK High Street. Superstores and internet shopping have forced
out many traditional businesses. In
their place we see rows of other kinds of shops: second-hand, betting, kebab and
pawn, half a dozen of each on a short stretch of road. But the poor still need to be fed and clothed.
The
grandiose old banks, like the grandiose old churches, have been boarded up or
put to other use. More popular, down-market
versions – Pentecostal missions and loans-till-payday bureaux – have taken
their place, sometimes literally.
Archbishop Welby of Canterbury, with a career
in business behind him, not to mention a well-known Biblical precedent, now has
it in for these money lenders. He recently
declared financial war in a very public way on a company called Wonga. Unfortunately for him, it was straightaway
discovered that the Church of England has itself been investing indirectly in the
same company. Naming Wonga, the
Archbishop not only embarrassed himself beyond all understanding, but also offered
to that business the heaven of free publicity. We assume, rightly or wrongly, that he
targeted Wonga before all the other companies because their business is the
biggest, and that it is the biggest because it is the most efficient, which
means it is the best place to go if we need some quick cash. The heaven of free publicity. If I irk the Archbishop, can he give it to
me?
Mammon
and God have long been twins. The
Virgins Money and Mary. Not many
businesses have property portfolios and multi-national interests as vast as those
of the Church. There have been shops in
cathedrals for decades, but now you have to pay just to walk inside these great,
stone monuments. For Canterbury
Cathedral, the entrance fee is £9.50. At
Salisbury Cathedral they charge £10 per adult, with a family ticket of £27 for “two
adults and one, two, or three children.”
That’s right. Unplanned charlie number
four will have to empty out his piggy bank, or wait outside.
Presumably,
that other heavy monument nearby would not have fallen into ruin if, for the
last five thousand years, visitors had been asked to pay the current £8 entrance
fee. Not quite so long ago, in a
different temple, Christ overturned the tables of the money changers. Perhaps someone pulled the same stunt at
Stonehenge, but the authorities followed his advice, and things went downhill
from there.
Sooner
or later we all pass our solstice. Things
shut down. Post offices now rent space
in pharmacies. There is a plan to put police desks in post offices. They’ll be dispensing more than justice soon. To combat pay-day loans, the Archbishop is
allowing user-friendly credit unions to operate on church premises. Why not go further and open up branches of
the Church inside the money lenders? It’s
true, one day some visionary capitalist might come along and overturn the
altars, but companies like Wonga don’t need to put the Church of England out of
business. It’s performing that task very
well by itself with a growing canon of controversies which now include the announcements
of its leader.
Meanwhile,
let us venerate the miracle
of interest. Receiving it is just like a
Virgin birth.
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