” “Anglicans: finances at risk” “

Another financial disaster, similar to the bad investments in the property market in the 1980s, has struck the Church of England. The Church Commissioners, the commission of 33 members to which is entrusted the financial assets of the English State Church, had to stand by impotently as 80 million pounds (120 million euros) was wiped off the Church’s assets, due to the collapse of the value of Vodaphone shares. The deficit of the 1980s, which aroused the suspicion of poor management on the part of the Church Commissioners, was even more catastrophic: No less than 800 million pounds (1200 million euros) were lost. According to the daily “Guardian”, however, the deficit in the finances of the Church of England caused by the collapse of the Vodaphone share price was even worse than the figure officially declared. To make good the deficit the Commissioners are said to have decided to sell a collection of paintings by the Spanish seventeenth-century master Francesco de Zurbaran which belongs to the Bishop of Durham. The paintings, which comprise the series “Jacob and his Twelve Sons” and which are hung in the dining room of Auckland Palace, the archbishop’s residence in Durham, are said to be worth 20 million pounds (30 million euros). Many Anglicans and intellectuals are against the sale, According to Simon Jenkins, a Catholic commentator who writes a regular column in “The Times”, the paintings occupy a special place in the heart of the faithful of northern England and the decision to sell them is a grave attack on the region’s historical and religious memory. Selling bishops’ palaces and residences? For some time now the Anglican Church, which at the time of the Reformation of Henry VIII in 1532 took over from the Catholic Church the management of the most important churches and ecclesiastical buildings in the country, has been thinking of the sale of its own artistic heritage as a way of balancing its books. The annual income of the Church of England amounts to 800 million pounds sterling, for the most part funded by the voluntary contributions of the faithful. The financial assets of the Church of England at the end of 1999 were 4.4 billion pounds (6.6 billion euros) consisting of money invested in the shares of “ethically acceptable” companies, i.e. not involved in the production of alcohol, weapons and tobacco, as well as property, land, shops, factories and offices, all of them in the UK. With these funds the Church Commissioners pay the stipends of vicars and bishops, pensions, and provides finance to parishes and dioceses. With the fall in the number of faithful who regularly attend church and the recent financial difficulties, many believe that the bishops’ palaces and residences are too costly a luxury. The archbishop of Canterbury himself, George Carey, declared last March that the Anglican Church cannot continue to allocate a sixth of its own annual income, 120 million pounds (180 million euros), to the maintenance of buildings that are the heritage of the whole nation. According to the Anglican Primate, many dioceses find themselves in a situation of having to choose between the stipends of vicars and the maintenance of 16,000 churches and 43 cathedrals, most of which are the protected cultural heritage of the nation and hence very costly to maintain. A recent plan to reorganize the real estate portfolio of the Anglican Church, with the title “Resourcing Archbishops”, suggests that Lambeth Palace, official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bishopthorpe Palace, where the archbishop of York lives, should begin to host congresses and rent rooms to boost their revenue. In future many bishops’ residences could be transferred to tourist organizations and opened to the public, or even sold. A bishop “on the move”. At Pentecost the Catholic bishop of Lancaster, Patrick O’Donoghue, announced that he had sold his own residence and has become a “bishop on the move”, who will live for a month at a time in the various deaneries of his diocese. The former residence of the bishop of Lancaster is a Victorian mansion with sixteen rooms and a park of 4000 square metres. In a pastoral letter to his faithful, Bishop O’Donoghue wrote: “Our mission is not to lament past glories but to free ourselves of what weighs us down and share with joy the treasures that have been entrusted to us”.