With glorious timing, a couple of Christian thinktanks chose the anniversary of the Occupy protests to publish their inquiry into the future of England's cathedrals. The CofE's great domes and spires, the report concludes, "are becoming more and more attractive to surprising groups". Hours before their research is officially published, that conclusion was underlined in ways which the authors had not expected, when the St Paul's protesters who had been turfed out in February returned to their spiritual home, and pulled a stunt during evensong.
Like Pussy Riot, the feminist punks whose protesting antics in a Moscow cathedral landed several of them in jail, the returning protesters might be accused of acting rudely. Having been asked into the church to read a prayer, they produced a pointed sermon of their own invention, flaunted a banner and chained themselves up. Despite, or maybe even because of, the consciously Christian tone of the Occupy submission, some worshippers may have been offended. It is provocative, some will say sanctimonious, for the church and its faithful to be told: "In the fight for economic justice Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, but you invited them in. And instead evicted us."
But the potential shock of some old lady dropping her hymnbook under the dome is of nothing compared to the many shocking things which Occupy has – in its chaotic way – drawn attention to. The shocking fact, for example, calmly noted in this week's Economist, that the plutocratic top 0.01% in American society has quintupled its claim on national income since 1980. The shocking mismatch between the jail terms meted out to English rioters for such transgressions as pinching a few bottles of water, and the abject lack of prosecutions triggered by the bankers' grandest misdemeanours. And the shocking announcement last week of another £10bn of cuts in social security, to make it perfectly certain that the poor will pay even more of the eventual bill.
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