Some hack on the radio was whinging that the Church of England was in decline because trendy happy-clappy vicars don't wear dog-collars and saying that we had to get back to tradition before anyone would respect us.
Ignorant prats. What tradition is this? For my entire adult life, maybe 30 years of going to church, a large proportion of evangelical Anglican clergy have not worn the gear. In fact it is more common for them to wear it these days than it used to be - many now do who would have made it a point of pride 20 years ago not to. And Evangelicals are maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of the CofE.
The Anglo-Catholics have been gaily breaking the rules for a century and a half - usually by wearing too much, rather than too little.
The dog-collar was a Roman Catholic innovation of the late 19th century, and was only accepted by most Anglicans in the first decades of the 20th. It was itself "breaking the rules" only just outside living memory. It is still no part of any official vestments, it is just a fashion.
Journalists who say "will we still respect the clergy if they don't dress up in robes" merely show their complete ignorance of the Church of England. And presumably their lack of respect for it.
I notice two, not entirely mutually exclusive, traits in most journalists who regularly write about the CofE.
A great many of them feel comfortable with religion but uncomfortable with faith. Like Clement Atlee they admire Christianity "except for the mumbo-jumbo". They are distressed at the notion that we might actually believe all this stuff, that we might give an intellectual assent to the Creeds, or consider that the word "God" might refer to a real person, external to ourselves or to the universe. They want the CofE to be a kind of museum that they can go to on Christmas Eve and at weddings. They are into choirboys and church bells and village f tes and curates on bicycles.
The other, rarer, sort are hard-line misogynist Tories of Roman Catholic sympathies who love to gloat over what they see as the inevitable demise of the CofE now that it has had the temerity to ordain women.
Some of them are nice blokes - one or two I've even met - you know who you are, Tom, Andrew, Tony, Cliff... but I wish they'd keep their claws out of the CofE.