If there is one man not taking an unholy pleasure in the fragmentation of the Church of England, is the leader of England and Wales's Roman Catholics, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor.

He was kind enough to see me the other day and I asked if the civil war in the Anglican Communion was good for the Roman Catholic Church. It was a vulgar, sectarian point but he said soberly: “Really, we don't rejoice at all. It diminishes the standing of Christianity.”

He is right. Even to me, a mildly sectarian Catholic, it is obvious that the effect of all this wrangling about woman bishops and gay vicars is that people will start to think that sex is pretty well all that Christianity is about. And, to put it crudely, that undermines the brand.

As the Cardinal observed: “Life isn't all about homosexuality and women priests.” Dead right. It's about the Incarnation.

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But I can see that an awful lot of people will feel a certain impatience with the finer points of the debates dividing the CofE. The question of gender in terms of the apostolic character of the episcopate, the problem of how best to interpret Leviticus xviii, 22 (“You must not lie with a man as with a woman,”) the status of the Archbishop of Canterbury within the post-colonial Anglican Communion - why, I can see that there is quite a constituency for whom these are anything but urgent issues. Indeed, whenever they come up on the news, you can sense half the nation mouthing “Am I bovvered?” as they go to put the kettle on.

Well, they are wrong. If the Church of England tears itself apart over gay vicars and women bishops it's bad news all round. Because, believe it or not, we rely far more than we might think on the practical Christianity of the CofE. The Church still punches far above its weight in social terms. Just how much was apparent in a report by the Von Hügel Institute in 2006 commissioned by Anglican bishops, Moral, But No Compass, which made clear that if you tried to put the value of the Church of England's charitable work into money terms on the basis of paying its volunteers the minimum wage, you'd be talking about hundreds of millions of pounds.

“In every government region,” it said, “we have found congregations, clergy and volunteers running post offices and cafés, doctors' surgeries and asylum-rights centres, homeless outreach and bereavement counselling, job creation and economic regeneration programmes, eco-initiatives and youth clubs, peace networks and Third World solidarity groups... They are organised directly from the heart of congregations without judgment or conditions attached.” You can't buy that kind of commitment.

The Home Office citizenship survey of 2003 makes clear that regular churchgoers - actually the religiously observant of all faiths - are 48 per cent more likely to be regular volunteers than their secular counterparts. So if more Anglicans drop out of organised religion and join the ranks of cultural Christians - ie, people who can't be bothered to go to church - as a result of these unedifying rows, it is bad news for everyone.

But, short of divine intervention - which is always possible - it seems quite likely that evangelicals in the CofE will go their own way. Some 1,300 Anglo-Catholics, at the other end of the spectrum, said this week that they might consider going over to Rome but at present they are thinking up ever more ingenious ways to avoid women bishops by arranging for their own episcopal oversight. I'm inclined to ask: “Why bother?” The Catholic Church is the natural home for Anglo-Catholics. They'd only be doing what Cardinal Newman did 160 years ago.

More recently, the ordination of women as priests drove a swath of Anglican clerics into the Roman Catholic Church - not out of misogyny so much as out of doubts about whether the CofE had the authority to make such a decision all by itself. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor observed that, back then, his predecessor, Cardinal Basil Hume, thought that this would end by breaking up the Church of England. “It didn't happen,” the Cardinal said, with something like relief. “It would have been difficult [for the influx] to cohere.”

For all that, the Anglican clergy, and their wives, who entered the Roman Catholic Church during that last wave, have been a real bonus. All of thosee that I know really do seem to have come home. And why wouldn't they? If they want authority, it's there. If they are looking for the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the creed, this is the historic embodiment of it.

Of course, there are arguments within Catholicism about homosexuality, celibacy, women priests et al, but these are not the divisive issues that they once were. On the downside, the newcomers would have to forgo the wonderful physical fabric of the CofE. There is less liturgical loveliness than they are used to - but the Pope is trying to put that right.

If the Church of England is bent on tearing itself apart, it is sad for the nation. But the options now for intelligent conservative clergy are to head for the long grass - or Rome.

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