Spiritually it is extremely bad for you; people are either too nice or too horrible. Expectations are unrealistic: you are a fantasy of projection and a lightning-rod for disappointment. And every day having to put up with jokes about actresses and only being able to move diagonally… The golden rule is: if you really want to be a bishop, you almost certainly shouldn’t be one.

Things are about to get a whole lot worse. Bishops are the latest part of the church now slated for reinvention — part of the twaddle-riven Welby-era revolution that is totally transforming church structures.

Traditionally, the role of the bishop is to be a vicar to the vicars, to support the frontline pastorally, and to maintain sound doctrine within the church. They are pastors who know what good theology looks like. They carry a shepherd’s crook to indicate that they have authority over their flock, to direct the wayward sheep. But for the most part, the sheep still do as they please. And for those on the more catholic end of the spectrum, they exist to maintain an unbroken link of continuity with the early church – one bishop passing on the faith to another through the laying on of hands. They have lots of symbolic responsibility and little executive authority. These days, we would call it soft power.

They have a significant role in recruitment. But when a vicar gets handed the keys to his or her church, the bishop has less power to direct what goes on there than most people imagine. Subsidiarity in the Church of England — pushing control down to the parishes — was established to maintain the balance of power within that unique ecclesiological experiment that is the Church of England: a church that is both Catholic and Protestant at the same time. Subsidiarity, and the legal freehold for vicars that has been put place to protect it, exists to make sure a catholic-minded bishop won’t go round sacking evangelical clergy, or the other way round. It’s the same basic structure that exists to guarantee freedom of thought for academics who have tenure.

But, of course, the more you protect the freedom of the parish clergy, the less authority the bishop has over them. So, whereas a Roman Catholic Bishop could ring up one of his priests and ask him — require him — to move to a new parish, a Church of England bishop could do no such thing. Which is why the CofE is a good place to be a vicar and a bad place to be a bishop. And you can understand the frustration of the bishops. They get the blame for all the bad stuff and don’t have enough authority to change it. Even more so, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Little wonder, over the past few years, the steady stream of bishops going over to Rome now seems more like a Biblical flood. They have proper bishops over there, so goes the thought, and with enough authority to resist all the things that a retired Church of England bishop hasn’t been able to put a stop to.

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The higher-ups in the Welby era have a different plan, and it is clever. Instead of seeing the administrative burden being imposed on the church as some sort of dead weight, they see it as an opportunity, as a route to power. These people no longer talk of bishops as being pastors or of the job being about ministry, they talk of “leadership” and “mission”. How my heart sinks when I hear those words.

They will absolutely deny this, of course, but the current travails of the Church of England, and the source of its internal acrimony, is that bishops – now recast as leaders — who have often only spent five minutes as parish priests, think that they know far better how to do the job. They are using the whole apparatus of the administrative church to find ways round the historic and legal protections that exist to defend the central model of a priest in their parish. In effect, they have decided to let the old model wither on the vine — by amalgamating parishes, cutting clergy posts when they become vacant — and redirecting funds to a whole new structure based on modern and secular lines of responsibility. The old church is too well protected legally, so they want to build a para church beside it, much better funded, but without the old legal protections. And one that is far more responsive to the “leadership”.

The cover for this transformation is the “let many flowers bloom” line. New ways can flourish alongside the old, they say. It’s a mixed economy. In some Dioceses — mine, in fact — this is how it is being played out. I’m lucky. But in others, the bishop has come to be seen as the enemy of traditional church structures i.e. the parish. That is what happened recently in Winchester, for example, where the bishop was forced to quit after an unprecedented rebellion by the parish clergy against his authoritarian manner and hostility to the old ways of doing church. And as bishops seek to use different channels to express their authority, parish clergy are joining unions — generally Unite — as never before. The old pastoral relationship between clergy and their bishop is being transformed into a business model, with more than a whiff of the acrimony that can exist between the boss class and the workers. “Save the Parish” is the fastest growing organisation in the church, and the mood is becoming more and more that of the awkward squad.

This is the context into which the Church of England now announces that it is considering a cabinet of senior bishops, with responsibility built around roles – Brexit bishop, Covid bishop and so on. The more Right-wing press thinks this is a foray into politics and that, as they are constantly saying, the church should stay out of it. But the church is intrinsically political because the Bible is. And there is no way a good Christian can stay out politics any more than they can stay out of pastoral care or worship. But the way the church approaches the political must be distinctive and grow out of its core convictions. Neither Right nor Left, the church isn’t party political. What is so utterly ridiculous about the idea of a Brexit bishop is that it gives the impression that the church tracks the secular way of politics, following it issue by issue. It is of a piece with the whole secularisation of the church that is now in full swing.

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Yes, the secularisation of the church. It’s almost as if our bishops have been to a half-day management seminar at McKinsey and have suddenly seen the light as to how the church should be more efficiently run. Every day there is a new flowchart, a new initiative from head office. Most of the clergy I know inwardly grown and — because of their legal protections — just get on doing the stuff they have been called to do. We tend to ignore many of the smiley management-clergy who sit behind their Macs and offer structural and paper-based solutions to the tide going out on the sea of faith.

It is understandable that organisations that are under pressure – not least financially – can turn in on themselves, and think reorganisation is the answer to wider cultural changes. But for the Church of England to abandon its traditional shape, thinking that some corporate model will serve the preaching of the good news better, is for the church to commit a kind of suicide. The legal checks and balances within the CofE have been build up for a good reason: to hold us together, to make sure no one part of the Anglican compromise can hold sway over another. The cynic in me now contends that we are increasing becoming a church held together by a pension fund — that’s why so many bishops go to Rome as soon as they retire.

The fear is that this new non-parish-based para-church structure will grow rapidly, but will not be able to survive the forces that have always threatened to tear us apart, and that bishops (not leaders) have long kept together. The para church will be like the wheat thrown on stony ground, that rises up rapidly because the soil is shallow — which will look impressive on all those spreadsheets — but that ultimately cannot survive the heat of the midday sun because it has no roots.

Bishops root the church in history and in place. They hold it together as the focus of unity. When their job description starts getting played about with, the end feels close for the church that I dearly love.

There is, of course, much variation across the board. The Irish Fine Gael party has long been associated with Christian Democracy, but is hardly conservative on moral issues, as demonstrated by their leader, Leo Varadkar, who vigourously championed liberalising Ireland’s abortion laws. But whatever their particular policy commitments, whether more liberal or more conservative, many have lost sight of the reason they associated themselves with Christianity in the first place.

In 1878, the Catholic Bishop Vincenzo Pecci was elected Pope and took the name Leo. Already aged 67, many expected his was to be a quiet Papacy. But not a bit of it. His regular tipple was a cocaine-infused tonic called Vin Mariana and he lived to 93, full of energy, with a particular concern for the condition of the poor.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the ground breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum – the first time a Pope had intervened directly, not on a churchy issue, but on the subject of economics and labour relations. Rerum Novarum means New Things, and the news things the church was responding to was industrialisation, the rise of the factory system, and the increasing mobilisation of the working class.

In Rerum Novarum, the Pope set out the broad outlines of Catholic Social Teaching with respect to economics – emphatically neither socialism nor free-market capitalism, about which he was especially scathing. Those who think that the present Pope’s lefty prognostications make him an exception among Popes ought to read a few lines from Rerum Novarum:

“Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”

This could almost be from the pen of Karl Marx himself. Except, Pope Leo had little good to say about socialism either. Whereas laissez-faire capitalism promotes the freedom of the individual to make as much money as he or she likes, and often to the detriment of others, socialism seeks to redress that injustice by giving too much power to the state to intervene in our lives.

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In order to protect human beings from an overly intrusive state, Rerum Novarum insists upon the importance of private property. The home was to be the safe space for the family, protected from rapacious capitalism and interfering socialism alike (both, of course, equally products of the Enlightenment).

Among the several interesting features of Rerum Novarum, one is its nostalgia for the medieval guilds as models for new forms of associations – or unions – for working people. This is important because it sets the tone for a fundamental principle of Catholic social teaching, that the basic unit of social and political concern should not be the atomised, free individual, nor big business, nor the over mighty state – but rather the small human collective, somewhere in scale between the family and the village.

This is, of course, a value judgment – that the proper site of human flourishing is the family and the local community. And part of the reason Catholic social teaching was so suspicious of industrialisation is that it disrupted and destroyed the basic building blocks of community life: living in one place over a sustained period of time alongside others doing the same; job security; and the communal trust that this security brings.

A number of theologians picked up on the themes of Rerum Novarum. In England, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc developed a version of Catholic social teaching that came to be called Distributism, a rather ugly word that none of its advocates were especially happy with. They celebrated the political scale of co-operatives and friendly societies, insisted on the right of all people to have a home of their own, and railed against the large-scale forces of alienation, whether of the Left of the Right.

Rerum Novarum also set the tone for a number of Papal letters that built on its insights. In 1931, Quadragesimo anno developed very similar ideas, introducing what were to become the two central themes of Catholic Social teaching: solidarity and subsidiarity. Both ideas came to exert a strong influence over later twentieth century politics.

Solidarity is a belief in the importance of thick, strong and stable communities. It is a belief in what we have come to call social capital – the sort of capital that is built up over time, in which people come to trust and support each other. It is typically in such communities that the elderly and vulnerable are looked after. And it is such communities that can readily organise themselves to resist the dehumanising forces of political tyranny.

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It was this sense of solidarity that the Polish workers of the Gdansk shipyards appealed to in naming themselves Solidarnosc (Solidarity). Gate 2 of the shipyard, a symbol of the struggle against communist oppression, came to be decorated with flowers and a portrait of Pope John Paul II and the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. Solidarnosc was as much a theological and a political movement as a labour union. And a direct outgrowth of Rerum Novarum.

Subsidiarity is a term that has come to be associated with the European Union, introduced by the Treaty of Maastricht and now enshrined in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union. But it began life as theological term, to describe a presumption of the moral priority of the small and the local over the large, the national and the transnational. In the EU, it becomes the idea that actions should only be taken at EU level that cannot be effectively taken at a lower level.

The principle of subsidiarity is a means of resisting the centralisation of power and harks back to the preference Rerum Novarum has for small guilds and workers’ unions. Subsidiarity is, for example, the central principle that animates a great writer and ecologist like Wendell Berry when he complains that the “locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature” built up over time and sustained by the bonds of affection, is “being destroyed by the desires and ambitions of both private and public life.”

Europe’s Christian Democrats were supposed to have been founded on the back of Catholic social teaching. But very little about the current ambitions of the European superstate, and its Christian Democrat backers, conforms to the vision of mid-scale social politics expressed in Rerum Novarum and its successors.

Indeed, the more convincing argument is surely that of the exponents of Brexit, calling for a repatriation of power to the local – they have understood more clearly the basic Catholic principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. It is the Christian Democrats who must rediscover their founding principles. Small is beautiful.