Thaindian News

London, June 2 (IANS) A senior Church of England bishop has warned that promiscuity, separation and divorce have assumed “epidemic” proportions in Britain.

Rt. Rev Richard Chartres said it as he called for Britain to use the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee as an opportunity to reflect and reassess values, Daily Mail reported.

The Rt Rev Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, writing in a Bible Society pamphlet about the origins of the word jubilee, said Britain was now an “enormously different” society compared to 1952, the year of the Queen’s accession to the throne.

Stating that the country is in “so many ways” a better place to live, he also said inequality had grown and material progress had been at the expense of communal life with relationships within families, communities and society “more strained, more fragile” and more broken than people cared to recognise.

“Literally millions of children grow up without knowing a stable, loving, secure family life - and that is not to count the hundreds of thousands more who don’t even make it out of the womb each year,” he said.

“Promiscuity, separation and divorce have reached epidemic proportions in our society,” he rued.

“Perhaps, then, we shouldn’t be surprised that depression and the prescription of anti-depressants has reached a similarly epidemic level.”

In his pamphlet, Chartres said the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was also an opportunity to “rebalance the scales” in society and focus on how we can “reset” the situation.