Bishop of Barbados defends property use: CEN 6.13.08 p 6. June 18, 2008
Posted by geoconger in Church of England Newspaper, Church of the Province of the West Indies, Property Litigation.trackback
The Bishop of Barbados has defended his church’s stewardship of the island’s glebe lands, telling the diocese’s annual synod the church was “one of the significant providers of land for housing and farming in this country.”
On May 18, Bishop John Holder told members of the diocesan synod that claims the diocese held “vast tracts of land” that it could “distribute to all who need” it was false.
“Most of the land owned by this diocese is that on which our churches, rectories and schools are situated. And these are surely not for sale,” Dr. Holder said.
Land reform remains a contentious issue in Barbados, with the Anglican Church and its affiliated agencies being one of the largest landowners in the country. “The Anglican Church did not pay a cent for the lands it now controls in Barbados,” independent minister Gordon Matthews told The Nation newspaper. “The lands were given by the state.”
The Anglican Church should hand back to the land to the state, he said. “If I had the power, I would go to Parliament and compulsorily acquire them at a reasonable price, not at the inflated land prices now existing in Barbados.”
During the colonial era, the Anglican Church acquired its lands by grant from the crown and through bequests from planters. Bishop Holder told synod the church was a socially responsible steward of its land and in recent years had sold to 63 of its tenant farmers the land they worked.
The Church was also responding to the housing shortage, and had developed land for construction as well as made property available to the government for the building of clinics, roads and other public projects. A resolution to Barbados’ land use problems was “not easy, but we will continue to make our contribution to the effort to address this problem,” Dr. Holder said.
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