Honors for Archbishop Prompt Criticisms

From The Living Church-

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s visit to New York City has drawn increasing attention because of honors that two institutions plan to bestow on him.

America, a weekly magazine published by Jesuits, will give Archbishop Rowan Williams its Campion Award on Jan. 25.

St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, Yonkers, N.Y., will host a lecture by the archbishop and confer an honorary doctor of divinity on Jan. 30.

Archbishop Williams also will be one of four featured speakers at a Trinity Institute conference, “Building on Ethical Economy: Theology and the Marketplace,” on Jan. 27-29.

America’s award attracted wry commentary by religion reporter Tom Heneghan of Reuters.

“What an award to give to the world’s top Anglican!” Heneghan wrote on Reuters’ FaithWorld weblog. “As the press release explains about the man to whom the prize is dedicated, ‘a martyr of the English Reformation, Edmund Campion stirred Elizabethan England with his daring missionary efforts and the great power of his pen.’ What it politely skates over is the fact that Campion was drawn and quartered for refusing to renounce his Catholic faith.”

Archbishop Williams has long been identified with Anglo-Catholicism, and was a founding member and patron of Affirming Catholicism.

The honors planned by St. Vladimir’s prompted a letter to Metropolitan Jonah by the Very Rev. Patrick Henry Reardon, pastor of All Saints’ Antiochian Orthodox Church, Chicago.

“Although the scholarly publications of Dr. Williams may be cited as adequate reason for his lecture at the seminary, news of the plan to honor him is already prompting a popular consternation and even scandal,” Fr. Reardon wrote. “Outside of academic circles, this individual is chiefly known for his public support for sexual perversion within the Anglican Communion.”

Fr. Reardon did not elaborate on that point. The archbishop, during his academic career at OxfordUniversity, made a case for same-sex couples in his address “The Body’s Grace” in 1989.

Archbishop Williams reflected briefly on that essay in a profile published in March 2009 by The Atlantic.

“Never in my career did 5,000 words make such a tempest,” Archbishop Williams said in that profile. “I wrote it as a professor of theology contributing to an increasingly tense debate in the Church of England. I didn’t think, I’d better be careful what I say, in case I become a bishop one day. When people ask have I changed my mind, I can only answer, ‘Well, the questions I raised there are still on the table. They’re still questions. And I still think they’re worth addressing.’ That essay is my contribution, made in good faith at that time. Now my responsibilities are different. The responsibility is not to argue a case from the top or cast the chairman’s vote. It’s to hold the reins for a sensible debate — and that’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2010/1/21/honors-for-archbishop-prompt-criticisms