Two things leapt out at me from this morning's argument on the Today programme (0731) between two clerics about the forthcoming marriage of the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles and their subsequent blessing by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Canon David Holding, a member of the Archbishop's Council, was having a barney with Rev David Phillips, director of the evangelical Church Society, who was agitated that the Synod does not propose to debate this contentious issue at all.

In the course of wrangling over what the Synod had or had not agreed, Canon Holding suddenly said of Prince Charles:

'Sadly his former partner, the Princess of Wales, is dead...'

Excuse me? His fomer what? The Princess of Wales was not his partner. She was his wife. Has the Church of England really descended to such a point of abject servitude to the secular behemoth that it no longer even talks about husbands and wives for fear of offending those who ofend against Biblical morality and supposed Church teaching?

Then he said:

'It's very important that we don't sit in judgment on any couple that comes to us... we have to move forward.'

So apparently, the Church of England now believes that it is 'very 'important' not to make moral distinctions between behaviour that is good and behaviour that is bad; between spouses faithful to each other until death parts them, and spouses who betray each other; between behaviour that observes Biblical injunctions and behaviour that tramples them into dust. As Rev Phillips scornfully protested, the Church was making precisely such a judgment (as far as it goes) by refusing to marry the errant PofW and CPB in church. To which the ineffable Holding replied that this wasn't sitting in judgment at all -- merely that 'the guidelines' ruled it out.

The Church of England appears to have become God's idea of a very bad joke indeed.