Diocese of Oxford Vicar Collapses Over Removal of Two Pews

A satirical essay

By David Virtue I www.virtueonline.org I September 27, 2026

NEWS ITEM: St Mary le Moor, Cadmore End, has been sanctioned by the Consistory Court of the Diocese of Oxford for deliberate disregard of the faculty jurisdiction when it removed two pews from the church and installed them in the porch.

"I collapsed when I heard the news," said Fr. Codpiece Filmore III. "This is the very end of the Church of England as I knew it. I was drinking tea with the verger when the post boy rushed in with the letter telling me we had been sanctioned.

"I sank to the floor and immediately prayed to St Padua of the Pews for enlightenment. I got my answer. He said I had to fight the court because the very future of the church hung in the balance.

"The church has been here since 1059. We are down a bit on numbers these days. Agnes is pushing 85, and Bartholomew Snodgrass just turned 90 and can trace his ancestry to King Henry. Psst. We think he might be a little bit illegitimate, because the king was a randy old sod who spread his seed around. No matter. He has been a faithful member of St Mary's for nearly 90 years, and all the poor bugger wanted was to sit in the porch because he couldn't stagger up the steps into the church. Now he is being denied that.

"There was a rumour that Bartholomew had a male companion, because he never married, if you know what I mean, wink wink. But we never asked, because he was the last bell ringer. The parish had a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy which worked well for over 100 years. The Church of England is only now catching up.

"The diocese is complaining about two pews when we have a disastrous archbishop who wouldn't know a hemorrhoid from divine healing, for God's sake. Apparently, she doesn't know a terrorist from a teapot, and if truth be told she can't tell the difference between a burka and a hijab.

"Privately I'm told she's a bit of a berk herself, as she entertains imams in the Palace while her truly orthodox priests can't get a look in at the palace gates. What sort of church have we come to, for heaven's sake?

"So I called an emergency meeting of the Parochial Church Council. All three of us came. Agnes brought her knitting, Bartholomew brought his ear trumpet, and I brought the Book of Common Prayer, 1662 edition, because nothing puts the fear of God into a diocesan official like Cranmer in the original.

"We resolved unanimously to resist. Well, two to one. Bartholomew thought we were voting on the flower rota.

"You must understand what happened. Those two pews had sat in the nave since Queen Victoria was in nappies. Nobody had sat in them since the Suez Crisis. We carried them twelve feet to the porch so an old man could rest his bones before Evensong. Twelve feet. The Israelites wandered forty years in the wilderness with less paperwork.

"But in the Church of England you cannot move a pew without a faculty. You cannot move a candlestick without a faculty. I am reliably told you cannot move a hymn book from the left side of the lectern to the right without submitting a Statement of Significance, a Statement of Need, and a bat survey. We have no bats. We did once, but they left for a more orthodox parish.

"Then came the letter from the Consistory Court, four pages long, with more Latin than a Tridentine Mass. We had shown 'deliberate disregard.' Deliberate! Agnes wept. She hasn't disregarded anything deliberately since 1953, when she skipped the Coronation to feed her chickens.

"The diocese says we must apply retrospectively for permission to do what we have already done. I asked the deputy registrar, a Mr Pettigrew, whether we might also apply retrospectively for the Reformation. He did not laugh. They never do.

"Consider the arithmetic. The diocese has closed churches, merged parishes until one vicar serves eleven villages and a Tesco car park, and cannot find a curate for love nor money. Yet it has found the time, the lawyers and the stationery to pursue two pews through the courts. Somewhere in Church House there is an entire department whose sole purpose is the defence of ecclesiastical furniture from the people who actually sit on it.

"Meanwhile Bartholomew sits on the steps. In the rain. At ninety. Descended, possibly and unofficially, from Henry VIII, the one man in English history who knew exactly what to do when a church bureaucracy got above itself.

"I am told the pews must now go back inside, where no one will sit in them, so that the porch may return to its liturgically correct condition, which is empty. Empty pews inside, an empty porch outside. The Church of England's vision for growth, perfectly realised in oak.

"I have written to the bishop. I have written to Lambeth. I have written to St Padua of the Pews, who has so far been the only one to answer.

"They tell me the Church of England will be undone by heresy, by liberalism, by declining numbers, by bishops who cannot say what a woman is. Perhaps. But I have seen the future, and it is a ninety-year-old bell ringer sitting on a cold stone step while a court in Oxford guards two empty pews.

"The Church of England will not die with a bang. It will die with a faculty application, filed in triplicate, and returned for want of a signature."

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com