Rowan’s Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop by Rupert Shortt
Hodder & Stoughton, £20
NOT long after Rowan Williams became Archbishop of Canterbury, he invited me for lunch at Lambeth Palace to chew over media matters. The Palace was impressive. The lunch – canned tuna and sweetcorn sandwiches perched on our laps – less so.
But being in the presence of one of the few truly holy men I have ever met made up for it. Rowan was a genial host and engaging company with a ready wit. Yet his unworldliness seemed to leave him painfully ill-equipped for the political side of the role God had given him as the reluctant leader of our established church.
I felt he would have preferred to be doing almost anything other than talking to me about the unholy workings of Whitehall, Westminster and Fleet Street. And those first impressions are confirmed in spades by Rupert Shortt’s excellent and sympathetic biography.
There is much more to this book than the story some newspapers chose to highlight from it; that of the suicide of a troubled young woman who had formed an unrequited attachment to the future archbishop during his university days.
What comes through is the constant torment he suffers as head of the fractious 70 million strong Anglican Communion. He is by instinct a liberal politically, yet feels he has to appease conservatives in the church who wish to deny homosexuals employment rights. He has no problem with women bishops personally, but sees it as his duty as Archbishop of Canterbury to compromise with those who do.
He is relaxed about disestablishment, while recognising that as Primate of All England his job is to uphold the established church. He is perpetually forced to think one thing and do another, which for a man of such honesty and integrity is evident torture. No wonder he wished the cup had passed him by because he could see it for the poisoned chalice it is.
Rupert Shortt may be quick to praise Rowan’s strengths, but neither is he slow to criticise his weaknesses. He singles out, for instance, the Archbishop’s arguments against tactical nuclear weapons as “simplistic as well as simple”. It was, says the author, largely as a result of Christian pressure on successive American presidents to end the insanity of mutually assured destruction that Jimmy Carter “resolved to turn the development of NATO’s weaponry from the morally unusable towards the morally defensible”.
Shortt also suggests that Rowan Williams’ search for solutions through mediation rather than confrontation makes a bundle of rods for his own back. He writes: “There is no point in insisting on the strict limits of your power and then expecting others to do what you tell them.”
Reading about the stubborn recalcitrance of some of his more unsavoury bishops, one is left wondering whether banging their heads together would not be a better way of stopping the Anglican Communion falling apart? But, as Rowan’s Rule makes eloquently clear, that is not Rowan’s way.
Nigel Nelson
