Pope Benedict XVI’s Sept. 16-19 visit to the United Kingdom…offered a series of tasters on what a universal primacy might look like. To begin, even if the British press tried to be cynical, it still gave the visitor acres of coverage. Only a papal visitor on a once-in-a-lifetime journey could achieve that. Inevitably media pundits were talking about how there were things Benedict XVI could do that Rowan Williams could not.
There are other signs that this new kind of papacy is emerging.
Benedict offered apologies. He apologized for the undiplomatic language of Walter Cardinal Kasper, who had told Focus magazine in Germany: “England is a secularized, pluralistic country nowadays. When you land at Heathrow you sometimes feel as though you were in a third world country.” It didn’t mean that he avoided the intent Kasper expressed. He simply found effective ways of putting across the message not to put trust in materialism and secularist ideology.
[blockquote] Inevitably media pundits were talking about how there were things Benedict XVI could do that Rowan Williams could not. [/blockquote]
There are many things that Rowan Williams cannot do, and it is entirely his own fault.
He has spent so many years failing to exercise effective orthodox leadership, and losing the trust of faithful Anglicans in the process, that now there is very little that he can do.