THE ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, reacted strongly to media questions in Dublin yesterday which queried the role of the Anglican primate of Uganda, Most Rev Henry Luke Orombi, in fomenting a climate in which gay activist David Kato was murdered there last Wednesday.
Bishop Orombi was one of seven Anglican Church leaders who boycotted the Anglican Primates Meeting in Dublin which concluded yesterday, because Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the US Episcopal Church, was attending it.
The absent primates do not approve of the US church’s ordination of actively gay bishops or its same-sex blessings.
Defending Bishop Orombi, Archbishop Williams, head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, emphasised that, as with other relevant Anglican primates, Bishop Orombi’s position concerned “exclusion from ministry on grounds of behaviour, not orientation”.
He continued that Mr Kato had been “named in this rotten, disgraceful Ugandan publication” – the Rolling Stone newspaper in Kampala – in which “effectively, his murder had been called for.”
It illustrated, he said, that “words have results . . . certainly a lesson all need to learn”.
Does Archbishop Williams really not get the connection? When will he learn the lesson that "words have results"?
UPDATE: Below is a snippet from the audio from the press conference following the Primates' Meeting in Dublin, which Lapin references in his comment:
"Does that not sound, if you pardon the language sir, Jesuitical?" - Irish journalist responding to Rowan Williams' defence of Henry Orombi at yesterday's press conference.
I don't agree with the headline at Audioboo, which reads: "Did you hear the one about the gay activist who was murdered because an Archbishop didn’t go to a meeting in Dublin?" Kato was not murdered because the archbishop didn't attend the Primates' Meeting.
