Repent, O Ye Bankers

Said the Bishop, in humbling homily:
"You bankers are quite the anomaly.
I'd like to convert you
To living in virtue,
Instead of behaving abom'nably."

The Wall Street Journal's Jason Zweig writes that the Church of England has called for "the financial industry [to] look within and search its soul." This call to soul-searching followed an invitation from the British parliamentary commission on the LIBOR-fixing scandal for public comment on how to reform finance. "The church calls for two striking steps," writes Zweig.

First, bankers should seek to build “a culture of the virtues” that would enable anyone working in finance to answer the question, “What would it mean to be a good banker?”... Second, the financial industry needs to apologize and repent.

The Rev. Dr. Malcolm Brown, director of the Church of England’s Mission and Public Affairs Council, elaborates:

It’s like shoplifting: Even if you put what you took back onto the shelf, you still did something wrong. Just restoring the status quo ante doesn’t give people the sense that trust has been restored. You can’t just put it back on the shelf; you have to admit that the way things were done was wrong.