Moral Superiority

The sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak has approved an initiative whereby members of the bigoted wing of the Anglican church can defect to Rome while continuing to address their invisible friend in their own special way. Like an American president invading a British overseas territory, the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak or one of his underlings just about found time to inform Lambeth Palace a fortnight before the blow fell. The opinion of the Archbishop of Canterbury was not requested in advance, doubtless on the sensible grounds that it would be couched in terms so subtle that the initiative might be hard put to survive it; the sixteenth Daddy Goodspeak is, after all, in his eighties. The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Rowan Williams, ever the New Labour politician, dismissed the annexation as "business as usual"; though he does not appear to have made any offer to go an extra mile by entering into full and visible communion with Vatican Incorporated on his own behalf. Taking the longer view, of course, it is indeed business as usual; not only in the sense that loving one's enemies to death is standard procedure for Christians, but in the wider sense that human congregations tend to find self-assured lunatics more attractive than dithering hypocrites. Blair triumphed over Edwina Currie's back-to-basics friend, whose name escapes me at the moment; Reagan beat Carter; Thatcher destroyed Kinnock; and Christ triumphed over the Pharisees.