the eccentric

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Dec 14, 2009

The Archbishop of Canterbury is annoyed with England’s Labour government, and particularly with the way the government treats religions: as if “it’s an eccentricity, it’s practised by oddities, foreigners and minorities.”

Yet Dr. Rowan Williams takes a similar attitude toward the Catholic faith—or at least toward the policies of Pope Benedict XVI. Less friendly than he was when the Pope originally issued his invitation to Anglicans, the Archbishop of Canterbury now says that papal initiative is “theologically rather eccentric.”

When it comes to theological eccentricity, the Anglican druid-primate speaks with considerable authority. Damian Thompson of the Daily Telegraph notes.

You can see his point. Much better to adopt a clear-cut, rational approach to the problem by allowing parishes to refuse to recognise the orders of the local woman diocesan bishop and neighbouring women vicars by supplying them with the oversight of a male bishop who himself rejects women’s orders but is in full communion with a primate who heads an international communion divided into an inner tier of provinces which obey a moratorium on ordaining gay bishops and an outer tier of provinces not in communion with the inner tier which do ordain gay bishops, both tiers also being internally divided between parishes which do and do not accept women’s orders and also disagree fundamentally on central questions of doctrine such as the nature of Christ’s presence in the eucharist, this difficulty being accommodated by the use of prayer books which contain liturgies that reflect different teachings on the nature of the sacraments and the priesthood, while wider issues of ecclesiology are tackled by herding together the world’s bishops into African tribal meetings called “indabas”.

Nothing eccentric about that, I’m sure you’ll agree.