The Times: Bishop compares those who ignore climate change to Josef Fritzl

A senior bishop in the Church of England has compared people who ignore climate change to Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who kept his daughter locked in a cellar for 24 years, repeatedly raping her and fathering seven of her children.

The Bishop of Stafford, the Right Rev Gordon Mursell, made the extreme comparison in a parish newsletter and said that people who fail to act to prevent global warming are “as guilty as” Fritzl and “destroying the future of our children”.

The bishop today denied he was accusing those who ignore climate change of being child abusers, but said Fritzl was “the most extreme form” of a common selfish streak in humankind. “In fact you could argue that, by our refusal to face the truth about climate change, we are as guilty as he is - we are in effect locking our children and grandchildren into a world with no future and throwing away the key,” he wrote in the letter distributed around the Diocese of Lichfield. Read more

And Libby Purves asks the right question:



This is the Bishop of Stafford. And today's burning question is "Why do they do it?" Why are Anglican bishops (in particular) so desperate to claw at public attention that they use the most extreme, inappropriate, tasteless analogies to make their point? In the whole history and literature of Christianity, is there nothing else they can draw on? Or are they compelled to leap on the bandwagon of the latest (preferably sexual) atrocity? Read more

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