Disorder of service

Meet the parishioners of Holy Trinity, Wall Street, the richest church in the United States. Meet Ellen Cooke, who took the Episcopalians for $2.2 million. Meet the Americans who first ordained English women and meet the campaigners for gay priests.

Ellen Cooke stole $2.2 million in four years from the Episcopal Church of the USA. But that is not why she was fired from her post as national treasurer in January this year. "She was fired for her management style," the spokesman explained. I asked exactly what this meant. He leant forwards and lowered his voice to explain: "She was a bitch from hell."

The Ellen Cooke scandal is only the latest in a series of increasingly grotesque accidents to befall the richest, and, in terms of bishops, most numerous church of the Anglican Communion. One bishop is under indictment for fraud; another shot himself when his love life grew too tangled; and three more are threatened with formal trials for heresy after ordaining practising gays.

Trinity Church at the end of Wall Street is the place to find Episcopalianism in its pomp. It is one of the oldest buildings in New York and one of the richest churches in the world (it is said that the Vatican owns more real estate). Outside, in the place where New York's Roman Catholic cathedral has a plaque to commemorate the visits of Pope John Paul II, Trinity Church has one to mark where the Queen of England stood. The interior is flawless English Gothic revival, circa 1834; the only American notes are the comfortable temperature and the perfect acoustics. It is the Church of England as done by Ralph Lauren. In the bookshop next door, spiritually and temporally improving works are displayed alternately, so that a dictionary of Catholicism sits next to a pocket guide to accounting and finance.

The Episcopal Church has been the motor of change and liberalisation in the Church of England, especially over women priests and bishops but also, to some extent, over gays. In the long struggle over women priests in the Church of England, the Episcopal Church provided a place where English women could be ordained, and from which they could return to officiate illegally at services in England. English campaigners for an openly gay priesthood have also been nourished by the Episcopal Church.

To conservatives, this is a church that has sold out every Christian doctrine of principle in compliance with worldly ambition. To its supporters, it is full of hope and realism at a time when conservative teachings are full of pious doublethink. But to both sides in its civil war, and still more to outsiders, it is the high temple of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, the church of the ruling class. Of the 38 presidents who have professed a denominational allegiance, 12 - including George Bush - have been Episcopalians, far more than have belonged to any other church; and these presidents have come from a church to which only 1.7 per cent of adult Americans belong. Members of the Church of England gave their church about pounds 240 million last year: Episcopalians gave their church $1.6 billion.

The grander prelates of the church live well. The head of the church, the Presiding Bishop, has a salary "in excess of $200,000" a year (George Carey earns pounds 40,000). Some conservatives have demanded that the Presiding Bishop, Edmond Browning, offer to resign for his support of Ellen Cooke, a statement his staff treat with the contempt it deserves. There is no tradition in any of the churches of clerics taking responsibility for financial catastrophe.

Yet there has been considerable criticism of Browning even from people who could be expected to be reasonably loyal, because Ellen Cooke is very important to him. While she was stealing the money, she was also acting as his hatchet man when budget cuts were pushed through the central organisation: 51 of its 200 staff were sacked during her period in office.

The broader charge against the Episcopal Church is that it now believes in guilt, but no longer in sin. At a time of rising demand for simple certainties, this makes it poorer and less popular. Membership of the denomination, along with that of all the mainstream, liberal protestant denominations, has plummeted since the Seventies, from 3.5 million to 2.4 million.

Yet while the church has grown increasingly tolerant of some behaviour which used to be regarded as unequivocally sinful, it has acquired a new puritanism towards behaviour which is regarded as victimising. One of the leaders of this tendency was the diocesan Bishop of Massachusetts, David Johnson, who brought in the most draconian rules about sexual harassment in the whole Episcopal Church. So it was really rather a shock when he killed himself on 15 January this year, leaving a wife and several grieving mistresses.

Johnson had been due to leave the diocese and move west to retire with his wife and their three children. A fortnight after his body was discovered, the Presiding Bishop's office announced that the dead bishop had attempted suicide at least once before, and had been involved in a number of extramarital affairs for a number of years.

In one of the most extraordinary condemnations of a bishop by his peers, the statement added: "At least some of these relationships appear to have been of the character of sexual exploitation." In other words, he was not merely cheating on his wife, but sleeping with employees as well; and it was the second of these crimes that was really reprehensible.

To a large extent, divorce is regarded as an inevitable disaster in the Episcopal Church, as it is in the society around it. Perhaps all Christian churches will have to reach this position eventually: certainly the Roman Catholic laity have, whatever the Pope may say. Three of the Archbishop of Canterbury's four children are divorced; and the fourth has never married. A former Anglican priest in Alabama, who became a Roman Catholic in protest against the ordination of women, is about to become the world's first divorced Catholic priest.

The story of Ellen Cooke the bitch from hell fraudster is more complicated; one might almost say more English, for it is the story of a social adventurer's rise and fall. As treasurer, she was paid $125,000 a year. For most of that period, her husband, as the rector of a suburban parish in New Jersey, across the Hudson from Manhattan, was making about $75,000 a year with a house and car thrown in. Their English equivalents might earn pounds 13,000. But English vicars seldom have more than one family to pay for, while it is almost customary for American priests to be divorced.

The difference in salaries also illustrates an important distance between the two churches, which is that the Episcopal Church has managed to preserve a lot of its social cachet and privilege at a time when the Church of England has been losing its faster than you can say George Carey. Ellen Cooke's progress up the organisation was also social progress, as emerged when the press started to dig up her background, which she had largely concealed.

Ellen Gerrity had started life humbly, as a journalist's daughter. He drank; the whole Catholic family fought. She married, first, William Koch, a 40-year-old widower (16 years her senior), whose first wife had died leaving him a son under five and a listing in the Social Register, both of which passed into the keeping of the second Mrs Koch.

Mr Koch became priest of a church in Brookline, an upmarket suburb of Boston. The couple had two children; the marriage lasted ten years. Eventually, each paired off with students from the local seminary to whom they had been renting part of their house. She kept the children and he went off to England.

Her second husband, Nicholas Trout Cooke III, was a former lawyer, described by colleagues as able and agreeable, but completely under her thumb. While he served his time as rector of increasingly prosperous and prestigious parishes (no small matter in a church where the parish, rather than a central authority, pays the stipend), she started a parallel career in the church's bureaucracy.

In Massachusetts, the most populous and one of the richest and most radical dioceses of the Episcopal Church, Cooke was treasurer for six years. It was a good time to be an ambitious woman. In 1987, she was chosen to become the most powerful woman in the Episcopal Church, quite possibly in the Anglican Communion, when she became treasurer of the national organisation in New York.

She seems to have been reasonably honest, though unpopular, for the first three years in the job. After that, she managed to transfer large funds held for use at the presiding bishop's discretion to banks where she had personal accounts. In the next four years, she transferred $1.5 million directly to her accounts, and wrote about $250,000 worth of cheques on the Church for personal services; $90,000 of that went to her husband's church in suburban New Jersey (he claims to have no idea that it was stolen). Other payments went directly to pay her children's school fees. And then there was her corporate credit card, on which she ran up $325,000 in four years.

Cooke explained her prosperity by claiming that rich relatives had died. Since the right sort of Episcopalian priest is expected to have the right sort of relatives, this explanation went unchallenged.

Because she had worked herself into a position where she not only signed, but approved the cheques, no one noticed the shrinking balances. Criticism of her centred on her arrogance and high-handedness with the staff. And it was this that led to her being sacked on 31 December last year.

She retaliated by submitting a final claim for $86,000 in back pay and benefits; some of her former staff questioned this once she was safely out of the building. Auditors were bought in - curiously, Coopers and Lybrand, the company which had failed to notice, until after the event, the English Church Commissioners gambling pounds 800 million on the property market and losing most of it in the late Eighties.

On 9 February, Cooke was called into the office and asked to explain the missing millions. She reacted as any American criminal in her position would: on 11 February, she went into therapy. There, she found absolution in ways that no priest could possibly supply. In her only public statement on the matter, released through her lawyers, she explained:

"In the judgement of the psychiatrist who has examined me, I am one of a small percentage of the population who by reason of personality are simply unable to stop in the face of enormous pressures and stress. He believes that my subsequent actions, blocked from memory during this time, were a cry for help.

"In the psychiatrist's opinion, I experienced a breakdown precipitated by many factors external to me and related to the workplace."

So much for the psychiatrist's explanation. But she had also consulted a priest and the consequences of that were what really maddened the colleagues she left behind. The priest "has consistently held up to me the truth of my inappropriate and wrong response to the situation in which I found myself. But she has also helped me acknowledge the pain, abuse, and powerlessness I have felt during the years I worked as a lay woman on senior level in the Church headquarters."

The idea that this "bitch from hell" who had sacked a third of her co- workers might have been suffering from "abuse and powerlessness" rather than handing it out was too much even for the Episcopal women's caucus, the strongest lobbying group for feminism within the Church. It issued a statement announcing that "Sexism, like racism, is well-established in the Episcopal Church, and it is wrong. That does not make it an excuse for actions that were both illegal and immoral." One of her former colleagues put it more succinctly. "When we heard that, we just went 'uuurgh!'"

Her colonial mansion in New Jersey, to which she had added a swimming pool in one of her more clamorous appeals for help, has been handed back to the church and sold, as has the farm in Virginia she also bought while her memory of what she was doing was blocked. About $1million of the money she stole was covered by insurance anyway. Her husband has resigned his new parish outside Washington. Though the Episcopal Church is suing them, the Internal Revenue Service will get there first, and probably send her to jail.

She is still disputing some of her expenses.

Recovering from the Ellen Cooke scandal will be made more difficult for the Church by a general revulsion against its central bureaucracy, which is felt to be inefficient, liberal, and largely unneccessary. The litmus test of these attitudes, as in all churches, is homosexuality.

The conservative faction in the Episcopal Church has more or less abandoned the struggle over divorce, and concentrated instead on homosexuality. The arguments about gay priests have been locked in the same vicious spiral for years: the state of play may be summarised by observing that the Bible is every bit as clear about the essential wrongness of homosexuality as it is about the essential flatness of the earth.

The headquarters of the struggle for openly gay clergy in the Anglican Communion is in New Jersey. Jack Spong, the Bishop of Newark, is partly famous for denying historicity of the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and almost everything else in the Bible. But lots of bishops do that nowadays. His real offence is to agitate tirelessly for the ordination of openly homosexual clergy.

He preached for 40 minutes earlier this month on the subject at a small church in Hoboken, a de-industrialised town just across the Hudson from New York, which has now been colonised by upscale childless couples. About 35 per cent of the town's population is gay, according to Spong.

The service was held to mark the sixth anniversary of the Oasis, a diocesan programme to integrate lesbian and gay people into the Church, as priests and anything else they want to be. Incense hung in All Saints' Church as thick as smog once did outside. During the prayers, the Missioner of Oasis, a Canadian named Harker MacHugh, added to those to be remembered in the prayers for the dead, "All my seminary colleagues who died of Aids, especially Michael and Alex and John."

The Oasis project had been the idea of Robert Williams, whom Spong ordained in December 1989 as the first openly practising gay Anglican priest in the world. Spong's sermon was an account of the progress of the campaign since then.

"Robert, like so many of his lesbian and gay brothers and sisters, had experienced rejection from the Church," said Spong. "The hurt of oppression and rejection on the part of the Church was deeper than any of us could possibly imagine." Almost immediately after his ordination, Williams revealed his hurt and rejection by telling a journalist that celibacy was always a mistake and Mother Teresa would be better if she got laid - except he used stronger language.

Spong sacked him immediately. Robert Williams died two years later of Aids, running a storefront church in Maine. There was no mention of these events, well-known to the congregation, at the anniversary service, as Spong continued with a long account of the struggle since then.

Last summer, the Church's General Convention agreed a truce, or thought it had, when it passed a resolution which seemed to offer the liberals further study of the matter in exchange for an agreement not to ordain any priests while the study proceeded. But almost immediately afterwards, Walter Righter, a retired bishop working as Spong's assistant in New Jersey, ordained another openly gay man.

Ten conservative bishops promptly laid a formal charge of heresy against Righter, and they plan to move on to Spong next. The leadership of the Church is appalled at this, but cannot stop the matter coming to trial if enough bishops demand it, as a sufficiently large minority seems certain to. However, the panel of bishops who would conduct the trial includes a majority who have already signed a letter in support of the ordination of homosexuals. Though the legal spectacle, and costs, will drag out for at least another two years, it seems that Spong's position is secure.

Yet he is no nearer to driving his opponents out than they are to driving him away. However much his colleagues may defend his right to make the judgements he does, few would share them. He did not dissemble this fact: instead, he urged his audience to hope for better things in England. Richard Kirker, the leader of the English Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, had spent a three-month sabbatical at the Oasis and many people in the congregation asked to be remembered to him.

"My brothers and sisters, when you get discouraged, just look at the progress being made in the Church of England," said Spong.

It sounds an easy, ominous note on which to end. Yet when you do compare the Church of England to the Episcopal Church of the USA, the results are not wholly reassuring. Ellen Cooke may have stolen $2.2 million, but the Church Commissioners managed to lose 600 times as much without enriching anyone except a few property speculators; nor have they managed to recover much of it.

No sex scandal in the Episcopal Church can compare with the career of Patrick Gilbert, the head of Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in this country, who, after he had been sacked for outrageous expenses, was found to have had a taste for underage boyfriends, and sentenced to two years imprisonment - suspended for two years: he was, after all, a secretary of the wine committee at the Athenaeum. Nor has any senior member of the Episcopal Church's bureaucracy been found living with a cocaine-addicted boyfriend, as happened to the Reverend Sir Derek Pattinson, the former Secretary General of the Church of England's General Synod.

At least no English bishop, whether or not he has been named by Outrage!, has ever admitted to ordaining a practising homosexual