From this Living Church article:
A spokesman for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is on sabbatical until September, said Archbishop John Sentamu was not speaking on behalf of Archbishop Rowan Williams, but instead offering his own reflections on current events.
Actually, that is quite interesting. I wonder why he chose this issue to break his silence?
One can’t let sentamunible statements go uncorrected.
It would be easy to read too much into this. The spokesman may have been directed by the ABC to distance him from the comments, but equally the spokesman might have been asked “Was the ABY speaking on behalf of the ABC?” and replied correctly “No he was speaking for himself’ ie he wasn’t instructed to speak— but that doesn’t mean the ABC disagrees with the ABY.
They ran it up the flagpole and no one saluted!
The trial balloon was pecked to death by a dove.
One man sentamu, sentamu a meadow ….
and nobody else came.
+Cantuar also, indirectly, broke his silence a few weeks back over some statements by Kearon+ which were in fact not those of +Cantuar.
Nevertheless the ABC is deliberatly creating ambiguity. He could clear a lot of this up if he would tell us where he stands and what he is going to do. From the beginning of this he has played both ends against the middle and this I think is fundamentaly dishonest with both sides. It has also lprobably led to people taking positions that they would not have taken had they known where the ABC stands.
The notion that Sentamu is ‘only’ Sentamu is difficult to sustain: he is, after all, No 2 in the C of E hierarchy.
I’m not sure about ‘dishonesty’. He’s trying to keep things going. Oh, I wish, I so wish, that people could agree to do deals and keep estimable people like Br. Michael on board.