sallycinnamon78
New Yorker
"Rudeness in today's church can afflict the highest, such as the bishop who told a curate looking for a parish: "You have to ask yourself who would want you at your age?", to a vicar's wife. Who said to a woman who had just lost her new-born child: "Maddening, isn't it?" "
Well. Anyone?
Letters expose 'breathtaking' rudeness of church life
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,1674601,00.html?gusrc=rss
Stephen Bates, religious affairs correspondent
Thursday December 29, 2005
The Guardian
In what remains of the season of goodwill, a religious newspaper has uncovered spectacular examples of Christians falling short of religious ideals in their treatment of fellow churchgoers.
When the Church Times, which has recorded the foibles of the Church of England for more than a century, asked readers for examples of rudeness, its editor, Paul Handley, admitted to having his breath taken away by the results.
A wheelchair user was advised to go home instead of attending a service, a vicar was told by a church warden that new families attending a service "weren't really our type", and a visiting vicar told bereaved relatives he had drawn the short straw in being asked to conduct a funeral service. At a choral evensong in one of the royal peculiar chapels - churches such as Westminster Abbey which are under the direct authority of the Queen - a disabled woman was manhandled by a sidesman because she could not get up for the national anthem.
Mr Handley said: "I thought nothing could surprise me in the readers' responses ... but as the emails and letters came in they constantly took my breath away. Correspondents have been driven to write at length about clergy who, on the face of it, ought to be pursuing another occupation, preferably one that doesn't involve anyone else".
Well. Anyone?