UNITED KINGDOM
National Secular Society
Posted: Tue, 07 Aug 2012 13:37 by Alistair McBay
Back in 2009, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, held a private seminar entitled “Leadership in the financial sector: a moral and spiritual challenge?” for top City financiers to explore the relevance of Pope Benedict’s encyclical on social teaching, Caritas in Veritate, for the financial sector. The Pope even sent a personal message to the meeting, the underlying theme of which was to see how the financial sector would be much more ethical with Christian principles.
The list of delegates to that 2009 City seminar now makes interesting reading. For example, you will find the Catholic Marcus Agius, then chairman of Barclays Bank, now soon to be its ex-chairman in the wake of the Libor-fixing scandal that was clearly well established by the time of that seminar but about which Agius says he knew nothing at that point. Another delegate was Stephen Green, (no, not that one!) then Group Chairman, HSBC Holdings and now Lord Green, Coalition Minister for Trade & Investment. Much has been made of Lord Green’s Christian belief — he is an Anglican lay preacher or ‘non-stipendiary minister’ — in influencing his business career, not least in his own book Serving God, Serving Mammon. In a typically obsequious piece in the Times (one of several, including one titled “The banker with God on his side”) the Anglican journalist Ruth Gledhill said “A senior manager (in the banking industry) told The Times that he believed it no accident that the world’s strongest private-sector bank, HSBC, criticised in the “good times” for being too conservative but now well placed to survive the crisis, is headed by an Anglican lay preacher, Stephen Green. Mr Green has made no secret of how his religious convictions inform his business life.” The inference here is all too clear.
But how does it stack up three years on, I wonder?
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