Reading the newspapers Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, may wonder if his last name has been changed to Says as in Archbishop Says. In the Roman Catholic Church there was a cardinal by the name of Cardinal Sin, but Sin was his family name.
Williams objects to the notion that as leader of the Anglican Communion and the state church he must speak on every moral issue or every issue confronting the church. In an interview in 2006 he said,
Leadership is – is, to me, a very, very murky and complicated concept. Often, as I – I think I’ve said before, what people mean when they say leadership is making – making the right noises, affirming a particular set of views, convictions or even prejudices. It doesn’t always have very much to do with how you make a difference. And I think the question I always find myself asking of myself is: will a pronouncement here or a statement there actually move things on, or is it something that makes me feel better and other people feel better, but doesn’t necessary contribute very much?
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What I mean I think is that why doesn’t the Archbishop condemn X, Y, Z? Because that’s what Archbishops do, you know, they condemn things, they – they make statements usually negative or condemnatory statements. And I – I just wonder a bit whether, you know, when an Archbishop condemns something, suddenly in, I don’t know, the bedsits of north London, somebody may say oh, I shouldn’t be having pre-marital sex, or in the cells of Al-Qaida, somebody says, goodness, terrorism’s wrong, the Archbishop says so.
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Again, what is or – or should be said in public is something I would – see previous remarks – weigh very carefully, what actually moves things on [in the divisions in the church]. I don’t believe that all of this should necessarily be conducted on the internet, as some do.
Andrew Brown noted yesterday at The Guardian blog: “He has remained friendly with individual journalists, but he talks to the press in public and on the record as little as he can. Even so, he can’t quite rid himself of the belief that somewhere out there he will find a sympathetic interviewer with whom he can talk without being overheard by malevolent idiots.” In another recent post Brown criticized the archbishop for appearing to be aloof to divisions in the church and, more specifically, recent “statements by conservative primates in Africa and South America have made it clear that they mean to continue with the policy of planting and extending their churches in the US.”
Giles Fraser sees it differently:
[The archbishop] wants us to slow things down, to resist the frantic fascism of the diary. He calls on us to fight back with a battery of practices: art, prayer, holidays. Not art to make us more sophisticated; not prayer to lobby God; not holidays to get us ready for yet more work – for all this is to render them in overly functional terms, as if they always must have some further purpose.
Tobias Haller asks though whether the archbishop hasn’t confused pontification with communication:
I am beginning to wonder if what we have here may be a failure to communicate. I am not the first to note the vagueness of Rowan-speak, which coupled with the Archbishop’s stated view that he is not in charge and cannot give unilateral direction, may lead to misunderstandings.
For instance, I can imagine a conversation in which Venables [Archbishop of the Southern Cone], noting that the Primatial Oversight Plan favored by Williams had failed to fly, suggested he might, on his own, extend the right hand and crozier of primatial fellowship to disaffected dioceses or parishes northward beyond the Cone. I can then imagine Williams saying this was well within his range of action — not intending approval, but merely observing that there was no Anglican InterPol to stop it — which Venables then took to be a positive encouragement rather than a neutral statement of fact.
A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.
Over the Thanksgiving holidays in the United States there was a major news story out of Lambeth. Williams wrote “to Anglican Communion Primates and members of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) with a summary of their individual responses to the outcome of September House of Bishops meeting of the Episcopal Church.” See The Lead’s coverage here. In the words of the ACNS press release the archbishop’s “own reflections in his (annual) Advent Letter to the Primates in the coming weeks.” Perhaps that is when the church will hear what the archbishop says blessing border crossings.