08/08/2008

Not what I think, what I say


The article below is a response to Rowan Williams: gay relationships 'comparable to marriage' in the Times (by You Know Who again). (I posted 'Lambeth post-mortem continues' direct from Google Reader as an experiment - won't do that again often, no flexibility.)

This is old news reheated. It does say, though this is buried, that Rowan Williams has consistently asserted that his own views are not important, what is important is the official view of the church that he represents.

Of course this demands a lot of sustained dissonance and careful mental compartmentalisation but it is nonetheless an honourable position. It reflects his catholic understanding of the church as primary and his rejection of the liberal emphasis on the individual (an emphasis or, perhaps, an understanding of 'individual' which I also find suspect). The cost, of course, has been to trap Williams in the official documentation (perhaps this contributes to the way in which so much authority has been attributed to the Windsor Process, far beyond its formal status).

All that said, it won't help unity to have his personal views spread over the world's media.

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