| “REMIND me again — what was the Reformation?” Thus a senior executive at The Independent in the mid-’90s, whose degree (he claimed) was in theology.
The question arose again in Monday’s Daily Telegraph, where a picture of Dr Williams was captioned: “Will today hope to solve the biggest Anglican crisis since the Reformation?” Really? Will Dr Williams be decapitated, like Archbishop Laud? Or deprived of his office, like the Non-jurors? Will anyone be jailed, like the Ritualists? Will there even be tithe riots as the news from Dar es Salaam comes through?
I’m writing on Tuesday, as usual; so I don’t know what the news will be, if it ever does come through. But the most important thing, from a media point of view, is how much more informative the newspapers’ websites have provided about this story than their paper editions.
This is not purely a matter of technology, though that does make it possible to publish very long stories that don’t need to be squeezed to make room for others. A page would have to be cleared each day to print all the blog coverage from The Times, the Telegraph, and The Guardian — perhaps more than a page in the tabloid Times, depriving its readers of juicier sins than those of the Primates.
That really isn’t going to happen: The Times didn’t even send Ruth Gledhill. She wrote on her blog that she was delighted to be at home. I don’t doubt her sincerity. There is something uniquely dispiriting and poisonous about these gatherings.
That was certainly the case with the last Lambeth Conference. The great value of the non-newsy coverage in the early part of this week was that it brought back with innumerable telling details the atmosphere of those days. I attach no particular meaning to the word “spirituality”; but if it means anything at all, it is the quality whose choking absence defines such a conference of world spiritual leaders.
ALMOST the first to start coughing and spluttering was Stephen Bates, who took advantage of The Guardian’s website to post a scorching attack on the Bishop of Winchester, the Rt Revd Michael Scott-Joynt, for his remarks about the Episcopal Church in the US before the Primates’ Meeting. The Bishop was a “figure of stately pomposity, not to say conceit . . . who bears an unfortunate resemblance in some lights to Lurch, the Addams Family’s gloomy butler”.
What set him off was the Bishop’s stately demand that Dr Jefferts Schori be excluded from the meeting at Dar es Salaam. Mr Bates responds: “The notion that the US Church — one of the longest established in America, an offshoot of the Church of England and the Church of most presidents since George Washington — is not Christian is so bizarrely overblown as to be risible. They may not share the Bishop of Winchester’s cramped, disapproving and drably censorious, desiccated Anglicanism, but they certainly have a clearly motivated Christian belief system, based on faith, hope and charity, the old nostrums that Scott-Joynt may once, dimly, have read about in college. He may not like their Christianity, but he can’t say they don’t believe in Christ.”
Stephen Bates’s report from Dar es Salaam, though, lacked the gloriously telling detail of Jonathan Petre’s for the Telegraph: that the press office of the “official” headquarters was located inside the security ring designed to keep journalists out.
This mixture of hostility and incompetence brings back vivid memories of the Lambeth Conference in 1998. The difference seems to be that, on that occasion, the Global South held its preliminary caucus meeting a fortnight before, in Texas, as if it had something to hide.
Again, Jonathan Petre’s blog was more informative on this than his news report, simply because anyone at all interested in the story already knows what will be decided there. It is the “soft” and atmospheric details that tell us what we could not have known last week.
“The burgeoning bunker mentality can, perhaps, be explained by the palpable anxiety of the organisers that the meeting could be derailed before it has even started by the powerful conservative group of Global South Primates, who are determined to seize control of events.
“They have set up their own headquarters a hundred yards up the road, in the Beachcomber Hotel, where they are holding strategy meetings before moving en masse to the White Sands for the official five-day meeting, where a bloody showdown is looming.
“When I mentioned to one of the conservative Primates that there was consternation among Anglican Communion staff about what is effectively an alternative headquarters, he replied: ‘This isn’t the alternative headquarters. It is THE headquarters.’”
And that, I think, is the most informative sentence printed so far this week.
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