| It has been a while since two broadsheets splashed with two different Anglican crises, but Tuesday morning brought us both Dr Williams on the front of The Guardian, and the greatest crisis since the Reformation — yet again — on the front of The Times. I can hear them sharpening the axe for Archbishop Laud as I type.
Oops, wrong crisis: this one seems much more serious to The Times. Actually, Ruth Gledhill’s piece about the Anglo-Catholic resistance to women bishops was a very good story: “More than 1300 clergy, including 11 serving bishops, have written to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to say that they will defect from the Church of England if women are consecrated bishops.”
This was interesting, even if the firm purpose of leaving had shrunk, two paragraphs later, to a claim that they would “consider leaving”, and 40 per cent of the clergy in question were retired.
It certainly blew out of the water any coverage of Watch’s demand that women be consecrated without any legislative safeguards. There was only a paragraph right at the bottom of the piece — “1,276 women clergy, 1,012 male clergy and 1,916 lay church members who support women bishops signed a statement objecting to the prospect of ‘discriminatory’ legislation to safeguard opponents” — to suggest the other side of the greatest crisis since the Bishop of Rochester was banished by Act of Parliament, and had to live out his days in exile in France.
No, not that Bishop of Rochester — keep up at the back. I was talking about Francis Atterbury, a man whose efforts for reaction make Dr Nazir-Ali look idle as well as liberal.
And so to Gafcon, probably the greatest crisis since the Welsh tithe riots. Much of the coverage I found immensely frustrating. Sometimes this was because the authors were not within 2000 miles of their targets. The Telegraph sent Martin Beckford there, but you would not have found this obvious from the coverage, where George Pitcher’s opinions were given much greater prominence.
“Some 300 bishops, principally from Africa, but also from the United States and Britain, claimed that they wanted to ‘sideline’ Dr Williams’ leadership of the worldwide Communion in favour of Foca.”
Those correspondents who were present seem all to have left Jerusalem before the statement at the end of the week. Ruth Gledhill, whose earlier stories had been full of bite, published a very curious one at the end of the week, more or less rowing back on everything she had said earlier, but then seems to have been the first person to use the name that became That Acronym: “The Anglican Church faces what is in effect a schism this weekend after the declaration last night of conservative evangelicals to create a ‘church within a church’. The new body, called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, will have its own bishops, clergy and theological colleges,” she wrote in The Sunday Times.
The next day, The Guardian published the obvious headline on its website: “Meet the FOCAs”; but, before then, there had been a long, clear piece from Riazat Butt and Toni O’Loughlin in Jerusalem: “Conservative evangelicals representing half of the world’s Anglicans launched a new global church yesterday, challenging the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury and vowing to rescue people from the forces of ‘militant secularism and pluralism’ created by a ‘spiritual decline’ in developing economies.”
The dog that did not bark in this was the rest of the conservative press. George Pitcher’s establishment boosterism in the Telegraph has already been noted, but the Mail ignored the whole thing, since it concerned foreigners, and was unlikely either to cure or even to cause cancer. But what was most surprising to me was the elegiac tone, even in some of the Church’s most determined enemies of the past.
There was a time, for instance, when Charles Moore would have been to the forefront of any movement to restore the Prayer Book and the Thirty-Nine Articles to the centre of the Anglican Communion, but what he actually wrote in his column in Saturday’s Telegraph was very different in tone:
“Some of the conservatives are almost as bad as the American heretics. They are right about the doctrine, but some of them are wrong in their manner of proceeding. They should not be so rude to Dr Williams. They should not denounce homosexuals as if they were barely human beings. They should not think themselves more truthful because they are more quarrelsome. On both sides, the thing has turned ugly.”
Yet, when I asked a friend who had actually been there what the mood in Jerusalem had been, he replied that it was not nasty at all, and almost entirely free of gay-bashing. Riazat Butt, too, a Muslim woman working for The Guardian, said she was treated with great kindness by the delegates to Gafcon.
This was an aspect of the story that could have done with more featurish treatment. Sometimes the way that things happen matters more than what happens; it is something that only a reporter on the spot can tell us, and newspapers are not good at remembering this.
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