The old-fashioned practice of a heartfelt apology, deeply rooted in the Christian theology of repentance and reconciliation, has now been turned into an episcopal Punch and Judy show with lawyers, bureaucrats and managers on fat cat salaries pulling the strings while their purple-clad puppets dance to their dirges, desperately clutching at mitre and crosier.

Deep in the spin-doctoring factory of episcopaldom, the ecclesiastical equivalents of Sir Humphrey Appleby are teaching their bishops to play the game of Catch Me If You Can while Sir Jeffrey Archer's techniques on the 11th Commandment Thou Shalt Not Get Caught are being honed to perfection. It is part of the managerial double-speak dominating all forms of damage control discourse in the C of E.

The puppeteers advise their bishops to use 'careful drafting' to 'effectively apologise' and to 'express regret' only using wording approved by lawyers, PR advisers and insurers. 'Because of the possibility that statements of regret might have the unintended effect of accepting legal liability for the abuse, it is important that they are approved in advance by lawyers, as well as by diocesan communications officers (and, if relevant, insurers),' warns the Orwellian document from the Ministry of Truth.

When is an apology a genuine apology? When it is neither as slippery as a banana skin nor as shallow as the paddling pool of a typical Anglican sermon. In his ground-breaking book, On Apology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.) Aaron Lazare, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, offers profound insights into the anatomy of an apology. Lazare traces the history of the world's most humbling act, from Lincoln's apology for slavery to Arnold Schwarzenegger's mea culpa after allegations of breast-groping. 'Why do certain apologies succeed or fail to elicit forgiveness and bring about reconciliation?' he asks.

'There's a right way and a wrong way to apologise. There are several integral elements of any apology and unless they are accounted for, an apology is likely to fail.' The four components for an effective apology are 'acknowledgment of the offence; explanation; expressions of remorse, shame, and humility; and reparation. Of these four parts, the one most commonly defective in apologies is the acknowledgment,' he writes.

'The offender (or the one speaking on behalf of the offender) must clearly and completely acknowledge the offence. People fail the acknowledgment phase of the apology when they make vague and incomplete apologies ("for whatever I did"); use the passive voice ("mistakes were made"); make the apology conditional ("if mistakes have been made"); question whether the victim was damaged or minimise the offence ("to the degree you were hurt"); use the empathic "sorry" instead of acknowledging responsibility; apologise to the wrong party; or apologise for the wrong offence,' says Lazare.

The psychologist and pastoral counsellor Carl Schneider defines apology as 'the acknowledgement of injury with the acceptance of responsibility, affect (felt regret or shame--the person must mean it), and vulnerability--the risking of an acknowledgement without excuses.'

There is a double irony here. All this, of course, is firmly grounded in the biblical tradition of repentance and in the Book of Common Prayer's injunction that we should 'acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickedness; and that we should not dissemble nor cloke them' 'but confess them with an humble, lowly, penitent, and obedient heart.'

But all this business of confession and contrition is intensely counter-intuitive to the managerial culture in the C of E. This is reflected in the dumbing down of its modern prayers of repentance to 'politically correct prayers which sound as if they were written by a committee made up of Tony Blair, Karl Marx, and Noddy.' What can you expect when the Archbishop's Council produces an idiots' Guide to Common Worship, which re-titles "Confession" as "Doing the dirt on ourselves"?

The other ironical twist is that apologies actually prevent lawsuits altogether and increase the likelihood and speed of settlement for those that do arise. This is evident from recent research both in the UK and the US. For example, one British study found that many plaintiffs who sued their doctors said they would not have done so had they received an apology and an explanation for their injury (Jeffrey S. Helmreich, 'Does "Sorry" incriminate? Evidence, harm and the protection of apology,' Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 21 (2012) 574).

Consistent with this view, legislatures in American states have enacted statutes that make certain apologies inadmissible in court thus encouraging more people to offer genuine apologies. Contrary to the recommendations of the C of E mandarins, a new secular culture of confession and contrition is seeking to encourage apologies by explicitly denying their admissibility as evidence.

In some instances the bishops have refused even to tender a doctored apology. Earlier this month Sussex police apologised to the living relatives of the late Bishop George Bell and the BBC admitted that some of its reporting on the allegations against Bishop Bell was wrong. However, the C of E is still refusing to apologise for smearing Bell's reputation and for the way it handled the case.

The comparison of the bishops with Pontius Pilate made by the survivor of abuse is apt, not just for its powerful metaphor of Pilate 'washing his hands' but also for its portrayal of Pilate as the puppet in the pantomime. Pilate is weak-minded, spineless, gutless, easily led and irresolute. The cleverly crafted literature of John's gospel portrays him as constantly vacillating back and forth as he listens to the crowd. Perhaps it is time the panjandrums in purple stopped listening to the men in pinstriped suits and learned how to say the two most humbling words in the English language: 'I'm sorry.' It would be even better if they learned to say the three greatest words in the biblical language of forgiveness and reconciliation: 'I have sinned.'

The Rev'd Dr. Jules Gomes is pastor of St Augustine's Church, Douglas, on the Isle of Man