Church solidarity with victims of extreme weather

More care for the environment, sustainable living and the adoption of simple lifestyles are needed to help prevent further flooding, according to the Bishop of Clifton, Declan Lang.

His comments came as the new Bishop of Plymouth, Mark O’Toole, visited victims of extreme weather along the Devon coast in the neighbouring diocese.

Bishop Lang appeared to criticise the Environment Agency over its failure to dredge the Somerset Levels, which are in the Clifton Diocese and have seen hundreds of homes being evacuated. “One lesson would seem to be the need to dredge the Levels on a regular basis,” he said.

The bishop, chairman of Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales’ department for international affairs and the environment, said there were wider environmental lessons from the floods. “Sacrifice, an unpopular and unfashionable word, means giving up one’s own needs for the common good of others,” he added. “Sustainable living is working with the earth, not against it ... Once the floods have receded, that spirit of community should continue with us all recognising our need to care for one another, and the environment of which we are part.”

Meanwhile, Bishop O’Toole said Mass in the parish of Dawlish on the Devon coast, where large waves have destroyed parts of the railway line. Bishop O’Toole, ordained last month, made his first parish visit to Dawlish. “Over Christmas, I’d been aware of the suffering in this part of the country,” he told The Tablet. “But I was really taken aback in the two weeks after the ordination by the scale of the devastation, particularly in places like Dawlish.

“It was my first visit to a parish in the diocese so has a particular poignancy for me,” he ­continued. “I visited the railway line before Mass and saw the ‘hanging railway track’, as well as the clean-up operation that the local people are going through. I was struck by how much goodness there is in such communities during these times of hardship.”