DESPITE the acute collapse of even nominal identification with Christianity in Wales, Bishop Cherry Vann’s election as Archbishop led BBC Radio Wales’s hourly news bulletins from 2 p.m. on Wednesday (News, 1 August). A substantial excerpt from the election press conference also led the primetime Radio Wales Drive, but the most significant radio coverage in the principality was a ten-minute interview with Archbishop Vann in the primetime 8.10-a.m. slot on Radio Wales Breakfast (Thursday).
After some brief discussion of the crisis at Bangor Cathedral, Archbishop Vann’s thoughts on the importance of mission were swept aside as Catrin Heledd got to the subject that really interested her: the fact that Vann is a gay woman.
Saying that she had received only positive comments since her election, Archbishop Vann emphasised that her experience as a gay priest since coming to Wales five years ago had been markedly more positive than her experience in the Church of England. Her good relationship with opponents of same-sex relationships in her own diocese of Monmouth was, she said, a cause for celebration, modelling diversity. Given that progressives are often accused of hostility to actual diversity of opinions, I thought that this deserved further exploration.
Then came the most interesting part of the interview. When asked whether she supported same-sex marriages being solemnised by clergy of the Church in Wales, she hesitated for a surprising length of time, before saying that they needed to work on what they meant by marriage first. Then went on: “I believe I am married to my partner. . . Partners marry each other, and the Church gives its blessing. The civil partnership provides the legal security. . . I wouldn’t feel the need to get married in church.”
This struck me as a significant statement, made with some nervousness for reasons far beyond simply holding together an acknowledged tension between those “desperate” to marry in church and those “very concerned about the prospect”.
After that, Emily Buchanan’s interview on Sunday (Radio 4) was anticlimactic. Buchanan asked whether Archbishop Vann’s election heralded the election of a female Archbishop of Canterbury, but she parried this by saying that the head of a worldwide Communion had a “very different role”. She acknowledged that some in the global South would view her appointment with horror, and that some might boycott Primates’ Meetings.
It was surprising that nobody seemed interested in exploring other factors that, Archbishop Vann herself said, were unusual about her leading the Welsh Church: an Englishwoman who couldn’t speak Welsh; nor did anyone seem interested in exploring why Welsh Christianity, across the theological spectrum, had collapsed so suddenly. If the Church is obsessed with gay people’s sex lives, it reflects a media culture that, for all its claims of celebrating diversity, seems more interested in gay people for what they are rather than what they might achieve.