Is it any wonder the CofE is dying on its feet? If any group should be capable of understanding the moral imperative of freeing people from tyranny, you might have thought, it would be bishops.

Think again.

According to the Sunday Times:

Hoon angered church leaders by announcing without consultation that the service — at St Paul’s Cathedral on October 10 — was to give thanks for freeing Iraq of “tyranny”. His gaffe brought him into direct conflict with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who feared the event would become triumphalist at a time when British soldiers were still being killed in Iraq. Williams insisted the service was toned down to one of remembrance for the victims on both sides of the conflict. One source close to the archbishop said: “We really dug our heels in and demanded the idea that this could be a thanksgiving be erased. We got our way in the end.”

How typical of them - a group so spineless and limp that they caricature themselves. Before the war, I took part in a debate with the Bishop of Oxford, in most respects a decent and intelligent man, but one who opposed the war as ‘unchristian’. As opposed, one supposes, to the Christianity of allowing a tyrant to murder his countrymen. I debated the Bishop before the war, reducing him - literally - to spluttering when I insisted he tell me how he proposed to remove Saddam from power without military action.

Is it any wonder the Church is such a laughing stock, when its leaders are a bunch of Pilger-lite appeasers who can't even bring themselves to give thanks that a butcher has been removed from power.