So a sense of proportion is missing. But the more fundamental question seems to be whether the church is on the right side of this argument. Not on the right side politically — i.e. whether Nichols is in tune with the popularity of welfare reform among many on lower incomes. And not even economically — whether the bishops should care more about getting the gargantuan benefits bill down. No, are the bishops on the right side of the argument morally? Have they really grasped what the turbulent minister is trying to do to the status quo? Or is Nichols actually opposing something which is a part, an indispensable part but a part nonetheless, of a larger reform package that really could change the country for the better? 

To write about welfare is to write about a reality marked by trauma and tragedy, which makes it really difficult to do with sufficient sensitivity. Before I left the UK last year I visited an area of Cornwall, one of the most deprived in the country, where around a third of working-age adults are claiming out-of-work benefits. One head teacher I interviewed told me that she has had 11-year-old pupils tell her that "I don't need to get a job because my parents don't, and they're fine." When you've come out of that context, when you've never seen your siblings or parents or friends go to work, it must be daunting to have to turn up at a Job Centre and even start looking for something so alien as a job.

Nevertheless, there is wide agreement on the principle of sanctions. Go back to William Beveridge. In his original blueprint for the welfare state, the Social Insurance and Allied Services report of 1942, the great Liberal stated that there must be a flipside to the state providing someone with "adequate benefit for unavoidable interruption of earnings". That flipside should be "the enforcement of the citizen's obligation to seek and accept all reasonable opportunities of work". The prospect of mass welfare dependency; of 1.4 million people receiving benefits in the last decade for nine out of ten years; of the huge numbers of unemployed remaining static during an economic boom — all this would have appalled Beveridge. 

And today it's not just the Right which insists upon responsibility. The MP leading Labour's policy review, Jon Cruddas, has said that his party's welfare reforms would be built around the concepts of "relationships, contribution and responsibility". His colleague Lord Glasman agrees: "The move has got to be from entitlement to responsibility." And back in January, when Rachel Reeves floated the idea of a basic skills test, leading to an offer of extra training for people, she made no bones about the conditionality component: "If you don't [accept the offer] there will be sanctions." 

What such agreement shows is that welfare reform, despite the bishops, is not inextricably tied to a malevolent effort to demonise the poor. Just because Beveridge, Cruddas, Glasman and Reeves believe in responsibility doesn't mean they blame the unemployed poor for their plight. And neither does Iain Duncan Smith. 

We now know how bitterly the Cabinet has fought over the language of welfare reform. The Chancellor, George Osborne, characterised the unemployed as those "with their curtains drawn, sleeping off a life on benefits". This lamentable caricature was to be bolstered by a Tory poster campaign pitting lazy thugs against hardworking families.