not too much

The Times reports a powerful attack by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who accuses the British, US [and, by implication, the Australian] governments of endangering the lives and futures of many thousands of Christians in the Middle East, who are regarded by their countrymen as supporters of the "crusading West." Christians in the Middle East are being put at unprecedented risk by the Government's "shortsighted" and "ignorant" policy in Iraq, he says. Williams has been backed by bishops across the Church of England, who say that Christians in the Middle East are now paying the price for the "chaos" in Iraq after the British Government failed to heed their warnings about the consequences of military action.

In a piece in the Times written from Bethlehem, where the number of Christians has dropped to quarter of what it was, Dr Williams says that one prediction that was systematically ignored was that Western military action would put the whole of the Middle East's Christian population at risk. He condemns the governments for failing to put in place a strategy to help Christians.

"The results are now painfully adding to what was already a difficult situation for Christian communities across the region," he says. "The first Christian believers were Middle Easterners. It's a very sobering thought that we might live to see the last native Christian believers in the region." In some Middle Eastern countries where Muslim-Christian relations have always been good, he says that extremist attacks on Christians are becoming "notably more frequent."

Dr Williams, who is visiting Israel with Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, Bishop Nathan Hovhannisian, the Armenian Primate of Britain and David Coffey, the head of the Baptist World Alliance, returned to Britain with a call for all British churches to take action to raise the profile of Christians in the Middle East. Dr Williams said yesterday that the Israeli-built wall around Bethlehem symbolised what was "deeply wrong in the human heart". [. . .] Senior bishops have thrown their weight behind Dr Williams.

Read the article in full on the Archbishop's website.

I’m glad to see I wasn’t alone in blogging about this — and thanks for the like to the Archbishop’s web site.
Steve Hayes (URL) - 28 12 06 - 21:07