But the larger and more powerful the “evangelical” party in the Church of England grows, the more it must come to terms with the problems of responsibility and comprehensiveness.One of my evangelical friends, a devout and unwillingly celibate woman who believes it wrong to settle for anything less than a husband of her own is given to lamenting her state towards the end of boozy lunches. Gay Christians must, eventually, come to terms with themselves; and, if they have reached a point where they can forgive themselves their nature, and are confident that it is God-given, they are less likely to acquiesce in their condemnation by others. Evangelicals have never, by tradition, been very good at coming to terms with human nature On the contrary, their role is to condemn and transcend it. The evangelicals dominant at present cannot concede that any homosexual acts can ever be right. On the other hand, they have not got the stomach to drive out or even very vigorously to repress the homosexual clergy in the Church.This is a policy – or an equilibrium of inaction – which relies on most gay Christians, especially those employed by the Church, being more or less camp and more or less closeted There are signs that this is changing. The difficulty is particularly acute for the Church of England, whichhas for so long been hypocritical for the very best reasons. It has in consequence been forced into an almost impossible position.

It is discussed as if it were a condition, a virtue, or a vice;yet it is something which must be incarnated if it is to exist at all. The churches talk often as if an instance of homosexuality were an act; in fact each instance of it is a person. It is something that properly belongs to a person, not a public figure. The effect was of huge solitude concealing an inviolable privacy. Somewhere in that rather difficult silence lies, it seems to me, the roots of the Church’s problems at the moment with homosexuality It is a part of private life.

So we talked about that instead, as darkness drew on in a vast empty house. It seemed full of the evidence of jollity: there was still a great Christmas tree in the hall; every flat surface in the living room was concealed under a thicket of Christmas cards: there must have been 500 at least in that one room. But there was a sporting chance that he would want to talk about that side of life if only to deny everything; and, though it might have madea juicy story, it would have made an unpleasant conversation.
However, perhaps unusually for a bishop, he wanted to talk about God and monasticism. I didn’t know whether his decision had been precipitated by being named by Outrage, though I now believe that it had not: certainly not in his own mind. Similarly, when an invitation came through last week to talk to the Bishop of Portsmouth before he announced his retirement, I was not looking forward to the dirty bit of the conversation, if such there was to be. This was the first time Un Ballo had been performed at the Palais Garnier; the Swedish version of the opera was used and the tenor made a vocally most elegant Gustavus III.Tagliavini continued to sing until 1965, when he gave his farewell performance at La Fenice, Venice, as Werther.