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'Take up your cross...'
August, the funny month, when work stops and the world flocks to Scarborough. The parsons, stuck at home, try to get the trippers into church to replace their lost congregations. Not a lot of people know this, but clergy are deemed to be self-employed. This is to prevent the church from being prosecuted under EC law and the Church Commissioners flogged round the fleet for violating the holiday rights of those to whom they pay the pittance which they laughingly call a stipend.
That is, until the small matter of weddings and funerals occur. In that case the diocesan authorities consider that they employ us and demand the fees be paid to them. If we withhold them we are the ones who go to jail. When it comes to holidays the opposite applies. The bishops pompously proclaim that their clergy are entitled to four Sundays off a year. This salves their consciences while they sip their dry martinis on the Costa del Sol. What they omit to mention is that, because the clergy are self-employed, they have, themselves, to pay a retired priest to celebrate the Eucharist for them. In this parish that would run to about £80 for each Sunday, £320 for the year. If it wasn’t for our kind Reader taking Evensong for nothing it would be even more. This might explain why the last Sunday that I had off was in 1984.
A “senior churchman”, whose budget doesn’t seem to run to sending Christmas cards or visiting the lesser clergy to enquire about the state of their health, sent out an extremely insensitive circular letter at the end of last year, intimating that he had no sympathy for those who didn’t take their holiday entitlement. He didn’t send a cheque to pay for cover.
This lack of proper recreational time has a precedent. I cannot recall Jesus popping off to Caesarea for a paddle. His modus operandi was to identify with the poor and rejected. We, as clergy, can hardly claim to be doing that if we are swanning round Paris while the poor swelter at home. We bear, quite gladly, this cross of endless hours in the service of those who need us. There is nothing in the Ordinal which guarantees us even a minute to ourselves. The Good Shepherd would have been very remiss if he had demanded a day off and given the wolf an opportunity to devour his flock.
God bless you all, Fr Allan.
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