The 69 year-old, who serves as a lay Baptist preacher in his home village of Headcorn, is willingly defending his action to the print and electronic media, even to the openly pro-homosexual ITV host Piers Morgan, because he wants to defend the jobs of other Christians, not his own.

Last October the Church of England announced it had settled the claim formally lodged in April 2014 after expert reports gave them "no reason to doubt" its veracity.

The Argus subsequently revealed Bell's victim was a five-year-old girl at the the time of the abuse in the late 1940s and 1950s, who recalled him telling her "it was our little secret, because God loved me".

The word "fear" has many shades of meaning, from the everyday and banal to the mysterious and existential. But this is still a rather unusual note for a leader of faith to be striking. It is certainly true that, for sceptics and believers alike, religion and fear have always been closely intertwined, but not in the way the archbishop is proposing. To its secular critics, religion is a method of playing cynically on deep human fears: fear of death, loss, calamity, social exclusion.

'We aim to be multicultural,' the head chaplain explained, so the word, 'chapel,' referring to a Christian place is as archaic now as the word, 'Missionary,' which he also said is never used anymore.