Bishops! Lead them not into temptation, because their verbal trespasses can be hard to forgive. At the weekend, as thousands of families and businesses confronted the filth and devastation of their homes and livelihoods, and some faced actual bereavement, two mitred misfits spoke out in a way that only the kindest could fail to interpret as smugly opportunist.

The Bishop of Carlisle, the Right Rev Graham Dow, said complacently that “this is a strong and definite judgment because the world has been arrogant . . . we are reaping the consequences of our moral degradation”. He went on to blame gay liberation: “The Sexual Orientation Regulations are part of a general scene of permissiveness. We are in a situation where we are liable for God’s judgment.”

When families of blameless sexuality and, very likely, considerable goodness are being comprehensively stuffed by rogue weather pattern, this is not a tactful remark from a man with dry feet and a palace. Less extreme but still annoying was that normally kindly eco-bish, the Right Rev James Jones, of Liverpool. He hung the blame on global warming, though I know of no scientist confident to do so. It’s a stuck weather system, basically: the same one that has just given my husband and brother a record fast passage across the North Atlantic under sail. Gosh, they must have led unusually holy lives; I never noticed.

Dr Jones, as the innocent suffer, says happily: “We are now reaping what we have sown . . . God is exposing us to the truth of what we have done.” And to cap it all, the Bishop of London refers to us “living as if we owned the world”.

A fine motto, suitable for embroiding on any teacloth. But not when you pin it to one miserable, wet, freakish and indiscriminate meteorological disaster. This sort of smug punitive opportunism gets religion a bad, bad name. I was brought up religious, and know that there are plenty of more constructive ways for churchmen to meet disaster than going “na na na, God is punishing us, told you so”.

In financial disasters they can give practical help – many do – and urge fellow-citizens to corporal works of mercy towards the homeless and the uninsured. To the devout they can use such grand old lines as “Thy will be done” and speak of God moving in mysterious ways. At the extreme, like the ancient nuns of my childhood, they can suggest that when life goes pear-shaped you just “offer it up, for the Holy Souls in Purgatory”.

To hijack a natural disaster and harness it to their own political and ethical bandwagon is the last thing good pastors should do. Unfortunately, too often it is the first.

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