FAME & (MIS)FORTUNE
As I write this, I find our church and parish splashed all over the local and national press once again because of our passing connexion earlier this year with the wedding celebrations of a celebrity. Let me offer three reflections about this whole ridiculous imbroglio.
First, this publicity is none of our doing. Nothing has changed in the last few weeks so as to provide a sensible reason for the whole issue of Elizabeth Hurley’s wedding fees (or lack of them) to reappear in the newspapers. No-one from our church has contacted the press, or prompted them to publish this stuff. Rather, the newspapers have been pursuing church officials, myself and the church treasurer especially, to make comments. For my part, I’ve had nothing to say to them, apart from affirming that I regard the business as a private matter, and that if the couple do indeed make a gift (of kneelers or anything else), we shall be appropriately grateful.
At the same time I’ve made quite clear to other church members that they’re at complete liberty, as far as I’m concerned, to say what they want to the press about the whole affair. There are no confidences for them to break, and if feelings of gratitude on the one hand or disgruntlement on the other have been stirred up, then let people say so freely.
Secondly, in the absence of much hard fact, the press seem content to present guesswork as truth. The amount we apparently charge for a wedding-blessing seems to have increased with every report, settling in recent days at the nice round figure of a thousand pounds. (If only!) What started as the indication of a gift has turned into a broken ‘promise’ of payment. The result is that both the couple and we are left looking foolish: they are presented as breaking their word, and we are portrayed as avaricious and ungrateful.
The facts are more prosaic. The event in March was not a ‘statutory’ service with set fees. It was arranged as a favour through the good offices of the Dent-Brocklehurst family, who are friends both of Elizabeth Hurley and of our church. There was indeed an understanding at our end that we should be reimbursed for our trouble, but a precise figure was never agreed. It may be unusual that the couple have decided to pay us nothing at all (it’s never happened before in my experience), but there has been no breach of contract in the process. In any event our expenses were modest, and we are left only a few pounds out of pocket.
Thirdly, I’ve been fascinated by the reactions this whole business has stirred up in the wider public. A feature of much press reporting nowadays is that newspaper articles are also published on the internet, with the opportunity for readers to add their own comments. Some sites are simply scurrilous – “Normally a fee is paid in advance, but the idiotic cleric actually trusted the couple to pay him afterwards. Naturally, they’ve swanned off into the sunset in a self-absorbed haze and he’s down to his last few drops of Glenfiddich” was HolyMoly’s take on the affair, while the readers’ reactions degenerated into a ribald fan-site for our church-treasurer. More significantly our own Gloucestershire Echo received a large mailbag, with a dispiriting number of references to the church’s wealth – ‘billions’ was the guess of one particularly ignorant correspondent – and to ‘hypocrisy’, which seems to be the instant reaction of some people to any church-related news, however irrelevant an epithet it might be on any particular occasion.
Every so often we’re presented with surveys of people’s reactions to professions or institutions: “Would you trust a politician more or less than a used-car dealer?” for example. My sense is that the church has declined in public regard over the last few decades. Our case is not helped by the inevitable fact that ridiculous items like an ex-celebrity’s non-payment for a wedding make the national news, while the day-to-day work of serving the community and caring for those in need, which is the church’s God-given task, are usually almost invisible.But that unsensational service is the stuff of this magazine at least – and so you will look in vain in the following pages for any further references to millionaires or models. Read on in safety!
John Partington
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