ENJOY the jubilee, did you? It was wonderful to see millions turn out to express their love and gratitude to the Queen. Of course, the Church of England did its bit too.

For example, the Church Times gave half a page to the Rev Dr Kenneth Leech who wrote: "Monarchy is opposed to the Christian tradition of equality". He referred to Her Majesty as "...that child of God whom some people call the Queen." Some people? What does Dr Leech suggest we call her? He says: "The jubilee stands for the preservation of inequality, privilege and injustice."

Shame on the editor of the Church Times for letting this class warrior loose at a time of national rejoicing. His article drips with malice and hatred. "At every point, monarchy is opposed to the Christian tradition of equality and solidarity," he writes. Not in the Christian tradition in which I was brought up - the same in which St Peter urges: "Fear God. Honour the King" (I Peter 2: 17), in which the Sovereign is Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church, and in which the monarch, in the Royal Declaration annexed to The Book of Common Prayer, says: "We hold it most agreeable to this our kingly office and our own religious zeal to conserve and maintain the Church committed to our charge". Or Article 37 of The Thirty Nine Articles, where it says: "The King's majesty hath the chief power in this realm of England of all estates of the realm whether they be ecclesiastical or civil."

Leech asks us to pity him and his cronies: "In 1974 a small group of eight socialist Anglican Catholics met at St Matthew's, Bethnal Green. We felt isolated in the Church because we were on the Left." This must be some sort of sick joke. Now that the Berlin Wall has come down, there are more lefties in the General Synod than there are in Russia. It is they and their socialist policies that have ruled the Church for 30 years - or would Leech have us believe that it was the Tory Party at Prayer which supported unilateral nuclear disarmament, the miners' strike and which devised the Marxist policy document Faith in the City back in the 1980s? The General Synod, and particularly its Board for Social Responsibility, is dominated by socialists and collectivists who constantly produce biased and unrepresentative reports on everything from glue-sniffing to overseas aid.

The government of the Church of England is consumed by the politics of envy. What other explanation can there be for the malevolent puritanism that orders bishops to give up their chauffeurs and their claret, to vacate their already modest palaces and take up residence among the lumpen proletariat? Of course Our Lord loved the poor, but there are scores of accounts in the gospels of his agreeable feasts among the rich. The truth is that Christianity is an incarnational religion, and this means that, whenever the Church's status and physical presence is reduced, there will inevitably follow a decline in its influence.

Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.