Britain's political health has been damaged by government claims that turned out to be false, the arch-Druidbishop of Canterbury said in a sermon clearly referring to the official justification for war in Iraq. Restoring trust may require an admission of error, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams said Tuesday in Cambridge. He did not refer explicitly to Iraq, or to the case for war which he had publicly questioned.
| "No, no! Certainly not! Just a general sermon on a point of Scripture, that's all!" |
"Part of the continuing damage to our political health in this country has to do with a sense of the events of the last year on the international scene being driven by something other than attention," said Williams, who was appointed by Blair to the post of spiritual leader of the world's 70 million Anglicans.
"There were things government believed it knew and claimed to know on a privileged basis which, it emerged, were anything but certain; there were things which regional experts and others knew which seemed not to have received attention.
| "But in the spiritual world, we can natter on like this forever without getting anything done." |
"Forgetting the melodramatic language of public deception, which is often just another means of not attending to what is difficult and takes time to fathom, the evidence suggests to many that obedience to a complex truth suffered from a sense of urgency that made attention harder.
| "But in the spiritual world, there's no urgency at all, and we'll take as long as we want to figure out what to say to our gullible flock." |
"Government of whatever kind restores lost trust above all by its willingness to attend to what lies beyond the urgency of asserting control and retaining visible and simple initiative; by patient accountability and the freedom to think again, even to admit error or miscalculation."
| "Especially when we can use an admission of error to tear out the throats of our political enemies." |
The archbishop said "we do not usually look in our rulers for signs of advanced contemplative practice."
| "And certainly not in present-day church leaders!" |
"But we do say that credible claims on our political loyalty have something to do with a demonstrable attention to truth, even unwelcome truth," he said.
| Tony delivered the truth, the Arch-Druid just didn't like what he heard. |
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