Amid signs of recovery in global financial markets, top bishops in the U.K. asked financiers to repent over their mistakes.
“There hasn’t been what I would, as a Christian, call repentance,” said the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams.
“We haven’t heard people saying ‘well actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty’,” he was quoted as saying by the BBC.
Archbishop Williams also said there was a sense of “bafflement” and “muted anger” at the bonus culture.
Dr. Williams and the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, flayed the bankers for displaying a lack of Christian values, arguing that moral and ethical debates needs to be given greater prominence as “economics is too important to be left to economists”.
Archbishop Morgan called for the church to ask congregations to force morality back on the agenda.
The bishops comments come amid warnings by a think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), that the lessons of the economic crisis have not been learned.
It said the rapid return to the City’s bonus culture showed real reform has been “very limited“.
Those warnings were echoed by U.S. President Barack Obama, who warned of complacency in the banking sector in a speech to the Wall Street on Tuesday.
