| LET’S DEAL with the good news first; for it has an important moral. Madeleine Bunting devoted her column in Monday’s Guardian to a defence of Rowan Williams on the unfashionable ground that he is a holy man.
What she quotes as a definition was actually said of the Dalai Lama, but she believes it applies to Dr Williams, too: “a man who had totally grasped the intense suffering of the human condition without fear or flinching, and yet was able to live with that knowledge and find within it hope and a great compassion”.
She goes on: “The holiness is not to be found in slick communication skills — both men are complex thinkers whose ideas are very hard to compress into soundbites — but you sense the holiness in the face-to-face encounter. A world that increasingly speaks to itself through media of mass communications increasingly cannot recognise this, the most inspiring of human experiences. . .
“What’s in short supply in some quarters are those much-prized Anglican virtues of patience, forbearance and tolerance. They have been strikingly absent in one small US diocese, New Hampshire, and in the dioceses of Nigeria and Sydney; each side mirrors the other’s disregard for how commitment to an institution brings a collective responsibility to each other and for each other.”
Ms Bunting believes that the Archbishop is trying to repeat the success of the Elizabethan Settlement. It is an optimism I wish I could go along with. For although it was a tremendously important resource for Latitudinarians in later years, it didn’t hold the Church together in the Civil War; and the borders of its tolerance were marked with public executions. Only a fortnight ago we have seen how the Thirty-Nine Articles can become fresh instruments of dissension in the modern world.
None the less, her article is important, first, because what she says about personal holiness and the media is absolutely true: it’s not a quality that can be mediated through a journalist; second, because it shows that some liberal commentators are beginning to see New Hampshire’s actions as a provocation.
THERE WAS a triumphant vindication for Jonathan Wynne-Jones’s scoop in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, when the Bishop of Ebbsfleet announced on the front page of The Catholic Herald that he had been in talks with Rome, in Rome, behind the back of the hierarchy here. His manoeuvre might also explain why the English Roman Catholic hierarchy might be reluctant to accept the gift of all these Anglican clergy and congregations who are said to be interested after the Synod vote.
WHY the Roman Catholics might want them was explained in the course of a long story in the Financial Times magazine about the financial health of the Church, which also had a sidebar about how the Roman Catholic Church manages to run nearly as many parishioners on a quarter the budget. (With commendable thoroughness, the FT had gone through the annual reports of all 22 RC dioceses in England and Wales, and extracted from them a total annual income of £279 million.) The secret is that it has only a quarter as many churches, almost all of them fairly new and so cheaper to maintain.
“It also has fewer and less well-paid clergy than the Church of England, many of them without pensions, and much lower administrative costs.” On the other hand, “Most of them are old, and it has become very difficult to replace them as they retire.”
The problem that the magazine sees for the Church of England is essentially the thing that makes it so lovable to outsiders: the wonderful buildings, which mean that the Church “also doubles as an alternative National Trust, caring for a high proportion of England’s most treasured buildings at the expense of a relatively small congregation”. More than half of the country’s churches, the story says, are entered by fewer than 50 adults a week.
Yet this isn’t a nasty or hostile report at all. Richard Tompkins points out that Anglicans are generous with their support to churches — giving, on average, eight pounds a week each on top of the four pounds that every Englishman apparently gives to charity every week. He pays tribute to the quiet heroism of the parish clergy, a quality almost as hard for the media to recognise and transmit as holiness.
CERTAINLY, I know that I often fail to do so. Perhaps one just burns out, writing jokes about bad news week after week. In any case, I can’t face another Lambeth Conference; so I am off for the next three weeks to a remote part of Swedish Lapland without a telephone or any internet connection. I wonder how much will seem like news when I return? |
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