Updated: The Queen once said she had an “annus horribilis.” So what would the ABC call the “noughties?” “La Década Perdida?”
Ruth Gledhill reports on Rowan Williams New Year’s message which will be released today. She says that he listed terrorism, war, natural disaster and the financial collapse as just a few of the disasters of the past ten years. And he found the climate summit in Copenhagen summit a big disappointment, too. And that does not include the turmoil within Anglicanism itself.
In a characteristically apocalyptic message that reflects the frustration among church leaders that developed countries are not doing more to forestall environmental and economic disaster, Dr Williams urges a traditional Christian response of pulling together to stave off disaster, arguing that it would be wrong to despair.
“Before we shrug our shoulders and lower our expectations, let’s not lose sight of one enormous lesson we can learn from the last decade,” he says. “The needs of our neighbours are the needs of the whole human family.”
…Dr Williams reflects on the UN millennium development goals, key objectives for tackling poverty and disease agreed on in 2000 by more than 200 nations and international bodies that “summed up for a lot of us the hopes we had for a new look at our world”.
The Guardian also reports:
He will say: “Before we shrug our shoulders and lower our expectations, let’s not lose sight of one enormous lesson we can learn from the last decade.
“The truth is that there are fewer and fewer problems in our world that are just local. Suffering and risk spread across boundaries, even that biggest of all boundaries between the rich and the poor.
“Crises don’t stop at national frontiers. It’s one thing that terrorism and environmental challenge and epidemic disease have taught us.”
At the start of a new decade the archbishop also expressed his disappointment at the lukewarm commitment to achieving the millennium development goals.
The whole text can be found here.