Paul Vallely: Doesn't this sound a bit too Christian for a bishop?

That great American comedian Lenny Bruce had the answer. How come, he would ask his audience rhetorically, when you go into the poorest part of town the grandest buildings inevitably belong to the Catholic Church? After all, it does claim to be founded by a disreputable itinerant Jewish preacher who spent his life moving among the poor and dispossessed. Doesn't quite add up? On the contrary, said the disreputable itinerant Jewish comedian, the Church men are smart. "They know that what the poor really respect is money."

It seems that the Lesson according to Lenny has passed Patrick O'Donoghue by. He's the Roman Catholic bishop of Lancaster, who has just announced that he plans to sell the beautiful £1m 16-room Victorian mansion which is his official home and spend the money alleviating deprivation and drug problems in Preston, Blackpool, Barrow-in-Furness and other less salubrious parts of his diocese. He will take a couple of rooms in his cathedral as his base but spend most of his time on the road, visiting his priests throughout a huge diocese which stretches from the Scottish border to the River Ribble.

Yikes. It all sounds a bit Christian for a bishop, you might think.

Holders of episcopal office do not generally take quite so literally the injunction to "sell what you have and give to the poor." Not that bishops haven't been good at flogging off the clerical silver in other eras. The Patriarch of Constantinople sold off the entire wealth of the church – even melting down the gold and silver from the altar – in the 7th century, but then he did want the cash to finance the armies of the Emperor Herakleios who was off to recover the True Cross, which had been pinched by marauding Persians.

Throughout the Middle Ages bishops behaved like princes, but then that was because most of them had been born into aristocratic families who took splendour as a domestic norm. Clerical riches therefore needed no apologia, and if one ever were demanded then you could always talk about reflecting the Glory of God.

There was something too about the maintenance of the dignity of the office.

Even saint popes like Gregory the Great ate in state every day. Conspicuous waste was actually a duty, since the left-overs from great papal banquets were given to the poor. An economical bishop was therefore just being mean to the starving, as would have been obvious to the matchless Gregory who actually had the beggars sitting at table with him.

Even when things got more austere they didn't sell off the episcopal plant. Another aristo-bishop saint, Charles Borromeo, during a great famine in 1570, sold church valuables to feed 3,000 hungry folk for three months. He also took down the curtains in his house to make clothes for them. Yet even he didn't go so far as to get rid of the actual premises.

But all this is the past, says Bishop O'Donoghue. He took "service not status" as the theme of his Whitsun pastoral letter on Sunday and chose as the motto for his episcopal crest Beati Pauperes (Blessed are the Poor) when he took over at Lancaster last year.

"I want to say to my people, and hopefully other people too, that the church is more than big houses which are status symbols from another era," Bishop O'Donoghue told his flock of 116,000 who, by now, are familiar with his fiery advocacy for the underprivileged.

Last week in his cathedral he led a workshop for secondary school pupils on the plight of asylum-seekers, a group who were the subject of his strongly-worded document Any Room at the Inn?, written to mark the 50th anniversary of the UN Refugee Convention. "I want to become a bishop on the move," he said in the letter read in all his 109 parishes on Sunday, "living for maybe a month at a time in the different deaneries of the diocese."

There is a problem with such large Franciscan gestures. You can only make them once. And though it is undoubtedly the highly edifying action of a sweet and good man, it does rather condemn his successor to a similar asperity.

Secular priests – that is those who are not members of monastic or other religious orders – don't take vows of poverty. Indeed there are those who argue that, given the testing sacrifice of celibacy, they need some compensations in the rest of their day-to-day life. The rector of one seminary in Rome recently carpeted the place with the observation that "living on lino risked turning the men into pigs". Priests lives are hard enough, argued one English bishop, who insisted parish presbyteries were well-appointed, without giving them a dehumanising environment.

And it's not just his successor who will stand judged by Bishop O'Donoghue's grand gesture. It inevitably carries the unintentional imputation that his predecessor was a lordly prelate living in grandeur on the hill, when in fact the late Bishop Brewer was the down-to-earth son of a market trader who transferred a lot of diocesan administration to the Victorian villa.

All of which is not to detract from the saintly simplicity of the new bishop's gesture. The trouble with saints, however, is that they don't make life any easier for the rest of us.

p.vallely@independent.co.uk