The Archbishop of Canterbury led the Church's "act of penitence" for its part in the slave trade. No matter that this trade ended two centuries ago and so all the Anglicans involved in it are long safely dead - we are all to blame.

This represents an interesting development in the doctrine of accountability: we are it seems now to be held responsible for the deeds of our forefathers as surely as if we had committed these deeds with our own hands. Where does the chain of culpability end, if it ends at all?

Am I bound, as a 21st century Yorkshireman, to apologise for Yorkshire's doings in the 15th century Wars of the Roses? Does Catholic Christendom apologise for the Crusades? Should all British people living today apologise for their grandfathers' bombing of Nazi Germany?

This eternal chain of corporate responsibility sits oddly with what the Archbishop has to say about other crimes. For example, on his recent tour of Pakistan he was anxious to declare that atrocities perpetrated against Christians in that country are not the fault of all Muslims but the work of a very few "extremists". The Archbishop and everybody you've ever heard of in the Church and in the Government say the same about suicide bombings - that they are the perverted actions of misguided fanatics and criminal psychopaths.

So these ecclesiastical and political leaders have introduced us to double standards in the realm of guilt and responsibility: anything any Christian does wrong anywhere and at anytime is the fault of all Christians everywhere and always; but crimes by Muslims are the responsibility of a deluded and depraved few.

The Archbishop, being the figure of authority that he is, I suppose I shall have to pay heed to him. So let me give him a bit of help in suggesting other crimes and misdemeanours for which the Church should say sorry. For a start all those misguided Anglican pacifists and appeasers who declared that we should not make war on Hitler must apologise at once for their craven and morally indefensible point of view. For if we had not fought Hitler, the civilised world would have suffered the domination of a tyranny so evil that it perpetrated the Holocaust. Would those Anglican pacifists have liked to have a Holocaust of British men, women and children on their conscience?

Actually in the penitence stakes we don't have to go back as far as the Second World War. Will the Archbishop and the hierarchy please now apologise for signing up to the programme of sexual liberation in the 1960s which has resulted in the moral and social chaos we now inhabit? It is the Church's teaching of that time that has led directly to the evil of 200,000 abortions every year, the weakening of the family and the demoralisation of sexual ethics. But we hear no repentance of these crimes from either the Archbishop or the General Synod.

Next the hierarchy should apologise for its support for the communist system and its frequently expressed admiration for the USSR. Significantly, no apology has ever been forthcoming for these things no matter the colossal suffering they entailed. Apologise? They'll be asking us to apologise for the Archbishop next!

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