Letters | 23 February 2008

This turbulent priest

Sir: Seeing that it was I who wrote the article in The Spectator five and a half years ago advancing the case for choosing Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury the week before he was actually shortlisted for the job, I have something of an obligation to ask myself whether I got it right (‘Just a posh version of Prescott’, 16 February).

The answer, I think, is yes. Let’s remember, amid all the kerfuffle, that Jesus himself also prevaricated on the tricky issues of the day, included the excluded and overrode doctrine. How enraging it all was to the righteous, to those fearful for their identity and their own moral fences! A woman was caught committing adultery in flagrante, and all he would do was doodle in the dust and ultimately remark that whoever was without sin should fling the first rock. He was playing for time, giving no robust lead at all. They slunk off, inwardly boiling. In that same chapter, John the Evangelist tells how the Jews actually jeered at Jesus for being a ‘Samaritan’.

The reality after five and a half years in the job is that Archbishop Williams is widely loved and much revered by a great body of the prayerful in a Church which, against all the odds, has not fallen apart and is improbably growing nationally and globally not merely in numbers but, I daresay, in quality of faith. Here is the primus inter pares of the show, speaking and writing with his idiosyncratic spiritual slant upon that broad rationality which is Anglicanism’s inestimable gift to Christianity. So far, I’m content with my hunch, and sticking with the prayerful.

Tom Stacey
London W8