Commentary
By Canon Gary L'Hommedieu
www.virtueonline.org
2/2/09
In each generation the world renews its outrage at the account of Nero fiddling while the city of Rome dissolved in flames somewhere beneath his lofty perch on either the Palatine or the Esquiline Hill, depending on which account you read.
Nero was a lot of things, among them a megalomaniac who murdered his own mother and one of his brothers. He is known to the church as a world class persecutor of Christians, winning for himself the status of antichristian archetype with the numerological title 666 in the Book of Revelation.
By all reports he was not much of a musician, nor an Olympic athlete, for that matter -- another one of the alter egos he played in his quest for international diversionary tactics. What he should have been doing while Rome burned was calling the fire department, or convening a volunteer bucket brigade, or running down the hill all alone with a bucket and seeing if anyone else followed.
What he did, proverbially, was fiddle while Rome burned.
This week in Alexandria, Egypt, Archbishop Rowan Williams is convening his fellow Primates to engage in their own version of world class diversionary tactics while the Anglican Communion burns. What's on their agenda that demands the urgent attention of 38 religious leaders, necessitating their travel from all parts of the globe at enormous expense? The invention of novel religious and moral doctrines hostile to Christianity and, for that matter, to all world traditions, making the name Anglican synonymous with Western cultural imperialism; or maybe the proliferation of Third World Anglican missions into the First World?
According to journalist David Virtue the archbishops will be discussing "things like global warming and the world economic crisis". In other words, they will be fiddling while Rome burns.
How, you say, can anyone fault them for taking up these very timely issues? These are pressing matters affecting the eco-structure of the planet on the one hand and the economy of all nations on the other. These two topics are the generic equivalent of every crisis making headlines at the present moment. How can one criticize them for such timely concern?
Easily. In a fire you call the fire department. In a time of ecological crisis you call on scientists. If the economy is in the tank, you call economists. No one calls a busload of clerics on a Mediterranean junket tour -- a veritable choir of grandstanders and wannabes.
It's bad enough that in a time of ecological and economic crisis we have to put up with career politicians forming their own timely responses in ways that just happen to advance their careers. At least there's the remote chance that a career politician will have a personal stake in making something happen that might benefit somebody else. In times of public crisis clergymen can only talk. Most people know not to take them seriously. The only ones who stand to gain by the clerical verbiage are the clerics themselves -- in the present case, putting off a crisis that actually reflects on their professional performance.
What is the special expertise of the Primates? What is their sworn duty as bishops in the Church of God? Were you going to say guarding the faith handed down by the saints, or driving out strange and erroneous doctrines hurtful to the Body of Christ? Why ever would you think such a thing?
Following the long tradition of cozying up to power and mimicking world leaders, many bishops see their expertise in recycling clichés from popular moralists, whether politicians or rock stars. In the present instance the subject matter has been proven safe for today's prophet and guaranteed to divert attention from a theological crisis that might obligate a bishop to speak out of his area of actual competence -- something for which he would later be held accountable.
Rowan Williams is not about to squander his legendary furrowed brow on a mere matter of faith and morals.
What is the special expertise which Rowan Williams and his Western peers bring to global warming and the world economy? With their professional roots in the modern university they are especially practiced in crafting fashionable denunciations of Western capitalism and imperialism, the mainstay of public personalities in democratic societies.
Only the democratic free states afford career opportunities to cannibalistic academicians who denounce their fathers while resting on the shoulders. Only in the capitalist West does morbid introspection, born out of a narcissistic opulence, pass for conscience.
The greatest irony is that, for all Dr. Williams' feigned alarm, it is the liberal sexual agenda that is the quintessence of Western imperialism. The pansexual movement could only thrive, albeit for a season, in a materially sated society, where formerly moral distinctions can be classed as lifestyle choices. In traditional societies traditional morals are the glue that sustains families and peoples. The sexual revolution imported from the West presupposes luxuries which have no counterpart in the Two Thirds World. Only a culture that can afford the luxury of narcissism can promote indiscriminate, sterile sexuality as a hallmark of justice.
The non-Western Primates who are not dependent on Western subsidies will not fall for this -- allowing Williams to throw the Communion to buy cover for his pay mistress, Katharine Jefferts Schori.
The Primates may have their concerns about global climate change. They certainly share the general concern about the global economy. They have much to criticize regarding the encroaching influence of the decadent Western powers. But they have other issues which demand their attention as Christian pastors and leaders. They have a problem that is unknown to Rowan Williams and those like him: the problem of explosive growth, and that in the face of interfaith violence.
These Primates know that the special expertise of an apostle is not photo opportunities and contrived statements. Some people have the nerve to tell a fiddling emperor when he can't hold a tune.
---The Rev. Canon J. Gary L'Hommedieu is Canon for Pastoral Care at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida, and a regular columnist for VirtueOnline.
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