Rowan's Repentance?

I’d not noticed for days that Archbishop Rowan Williams may have repented of some of his previous statements on homosexuality.

Reproduced below is some of Virtue Online's discussion of what’s happened, which can be followed up here:

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=4637

A Telegraph article by Jonathan Wynne-Jone on 27^th August available at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/08/27/ngay27.xml

seems to have picked up comments Rowan made to a Dutch journalist. A strange way to announce your repentance, perhaps. Reform have welcomed it and the gay lobby are in a tizzy.

Williams has told homosexuals that they need to change their behavior if they are to be welcomed into the church. The church, he said, must be a welcoming community but is not an inclusive one.

Rowan Williams has distanced himself from his one-time liberal support of gay relationships and stressed that the tradition and teaching of the Church has in no way been altered by the Anglican Communion's consecration of its first openly homosexual bishop.

"I don't believe inclusion is a value in itself. Welcome is. We don't say 'Come in and we ask no questions'. I do believe conversion means conversion of habits, behaviours, ideas, emotions," he said.

At the same time he tried to distance himself from a controversial essay, ‘The Body’s Grace’, he wrote 20 years ago, in which he defended same-sex love. "That was when I was a professor, to stimulate debate," he claimed. "It did not generate much support and a lot of criticism - quite fairly on a number of points."