A turbulent priest

Just when you thought that the Church of England was slipping into managerial mediocrity, a surprisingly splenetic rant in the Telegraph this morning from Peter Mullen, the Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange. He is not a follower of the Rowan Williams’ school of muddled thinking. Read the entire column, but here is a taster:

“We might have expected the Church to resist the decay, but instead it has connived with the destructive sexual and social revolution begun in the 1960s. Back then, I voted for homosexuality to be decriminalised. But this meant “between consenting adults in private” – where “between” meant two, “adults” meant men over 21 and “private” meant behind locked doors. I did not foresee the obscene and coercive “Gay Pride” pantomimes that now disfigure our high streets.

Who would have thought we would live to see the Bishop of Hereford fined £47,000 and made to attend a re-education course because he refused to employ a practising homosexual in his diocese’s youth services? How long before I am carted from the pulpit to the nick for preaching that sodomy is not morally equivalent to Christian marriage?”

Quite enough on Rowan

I had hoped I would resist the temptation, particularly as it is Lent, to post again about this matter. However this morning’s reports of Church of England representatives ‘rallying around Rowan Williams’, and in particular the endorsement of the Bishop of Blackburn, proved irresistible. Nicholas Reade, Bishop of Blackburn said:

“Dr Williams has shown outstanding leadership and signalled that the Church must move on from this controversy”.

I remain to be convinced that the ability to find the paddle when up S*** Creek marks someone out as an outstanding leader; not least because in the real world we apply a slightly more stringent set of criteria. But if the bishops are happy (and clearly they are easily pleased), then so be it. My view is that once again Rowan Williams has demonstrated that he is exactly the opposite.

I fear that Mathew d’Ancona was right in his Coffee House post The Archbishop of Cant , when he wrote:

“It has been said by one or two more astute commentators since the row over sharia began last Thursday that Dr Williams’s whispering diffidence conceals an intellectual arrogance that lies at the heart of the problem. . . This [his explanation] was peevish stuff, dressed up as prayerful thoughtfulness. Dr Williams has a lot more explaining to do.”

I will do my best to make this post my final comment on this subject , as there are so many other more interesting and relevant things to write about. Which doesn’t say much for the Church of England.

He doth protest too much

Reading the papers this morning, all still full of the Sharia law row, I had the feeling that Rowan Williams knew exactly what he was doing, and what the result would be. He is far too clever not to have known, but then again possibly too clever by half. Matthew d’Ancona hits the nail on the head in his post Canterbury Tales in Coffee House, when he finishes,

“. . . as someone who spent some time in academia, I am always suspicious of intellectuals who plead naiveté and innocence after the event when they have sent a depth charge into our culture. I think Dr Williams knew what he was doing, and is dismayed not by the passion of the response but by how few people are supporting him. That, I imagine, is the bit that really stings.”

Two thoughts, first, it’s a shame that Dr Williams had not had the opportunity to read the excellent article in today’s FT Magazine, where John Thornhill has lunch with Theodore Zeldin. Zeldin may have been talking about Sarkozy’s France when he said, “You have to accept that traditions exist, that people don’t change their minds very quickly, that people are scared”, but it holds as true this side of the Channel as it does over there. According to Thornhill, Zeldin argues that ‘it is vital to avoid, rather than provoke, confrontation. It is better to allow old problems to wither while encouraging new possibilities to emerge alongside’. And secondly, for a reasoned view on the row, and why Rowan Williams is wrong, read the FT leader, Muddled response to multiculturalism. This makes it clear that the real battle for Williams is to change the way in which the post-Christian West treats religion,so that it ceases to be locked into ‘the private realm of individual choice’. He is just the latest in a long line to try to fight this, but whether he is going about it the right way I doubt.

The wisest fool in Christendom

I can only wonder at the reports (see BBC News) that Rowan Williams is ‘overwhelmed by the “hostility of the response” after his call for parts of Sharia law to be recognised in the UK’. Quite what he expected the reaction of press, public and church to be, clearly it wasn’t this. Bishop Lowe may consider him “one of the greatest and brightest Archbishops of Canterbury we have had for many a long day”, but having a brain the size of a planet is clearly sometimes a disadvantage, when dealing with the rest of us.

Another Rowan Williams moment

Watching the report on Rowan Williams’ comments about Sharia law on the BBC News, I felt that the response of the Conservatives, that his remarks were “unhelpful”, was somewhat of an understatement. Perhaps it is just the problem of appointing academics, and then allowing them the opportunity to indulge in philosophical debate with themselves. Alternatively, of course, the man is mad.