St Paul’s ‘deserter’ back in a dog collar

St. Mary's Stoke Newington in south London has a new parish priest – the St Paul’s ‘deserter’ Rev Giles Frazer.

It’s impossible to make up.  First he resigns as Canon of St Paul’s because he is worried that the police might use violence to remove the Occupy protestors that he'd encouraged … then he gets a job blogging for the Guardian.  And now that this!

I am sure that the right on Rev is a deeply religious man, but would you want a parish priest who might suddenly up sticks on some weird point of principal?  I wouldn’t.  He’s clearly unreliable.

Lucky Guardian readers will be able to follow Rev’s thoughts in a blog.

Well, atr least the Church of England didn't make him a bishop, as the Guardian alleges.

Rev Fraser, 47, told the Guardian that he was looking forward to starting work after a difficult few months. "After I resigned there was no plan B whatsoever," he said. "It was just a total principled decision. It has been a very dark period thinking about what I’m supposed to be doing with my life."

He said he immediately felt drawn to the parish in Southwark, a borough undergoing a £1.5bn redevelopment after years of neglect.

"I love London and I couldn’t leave it," he said. "I went to see the bishop of Southwark and he said: ‘I’ve got a parish coming up and I think you should have a look.”

In the interview Rev Frazer comes up with some truly stunning insights.  Take this: “London is a tale of two cities, he observes, “you’ve got the City of London, where people make extraordinary amounts of money, and you’ve got another London, represented by places like the Elephant & Castle, which is largely forgotten.”  What does he mean, ‘forgotten’?

He says that the church’s job (and presumably his) is to ‘be an advocate and to shine a light on poverty.’

He said the Church of England derived its moral authority to speak out on issues of poverty and urban neglect from the fact it had a church in every community in the country and could therefore provide a voice for the forgotten and marginalised.

He claims that he, at least, did not regret his time at St Paul’s – “I learned a great deal about the way the world works and I had some fantastic colleagues.

As if we haven’t had enough of Rev Frazer, he says he’s working on a book about the ‘meaning and impact’ of the financial crisis.  His qualification? “I arrived at St Paul’s,” he told the Guardian, “when Lehman Brothers collapsed and I left during Occupy.”

Tellingly, he says that St Paul’s wasn’t the right platform for him to lecture us about what’s wrong with the world.  “The St Paul’s building is magnificent but it can be a distraction,” he told the Guardian. “That ceremonial side of things is all very well but I’m not sure it was the right place for me to address the wider moral issues that are going on in this country.”

Remember what Rev Frazer told the world when he ran away from St Paul’s?

“St Paul was a tentmaker,” he said. “If you looked around and you tried to recreate where Jesus would be born – for me, I could imagine Jesus being born in the camp. It is not about my sympathies or what I believe about the camp … The church cannot answer peaceful protest with violence.”

• The Occupy protest at St Paul’s ended a few weeks ago with the bishop of London suggesting a permanent memorial INSIDE St Paul’s!  You couldn’t make it up!

www.guardian.co.uk