同樣跟經濟有關的報道是今天《每日電訊報》在頭版刊登的一篇文章，文章說英國坎特伯雷大主教今天（12月22日）發出警告說，英國在處理經濟衰退的問題上必須要吸取納粹德國的經驗。

文章說，坎特伯雷大主教威廉姆斯的這番話可能會被看作是對首相布朗刺激經濟計劃的進一步攻擊，同時也可能會損害唐寧街和蘭貝斯宮之間的關係。

《每日電訊報》的另一篇文章也引用國際貨幣基金組織的話說，本次的經濟危機是70年以來最嚴重的一次。

Rowan Williams 'speaks truth to power'

Once seen as an out-of-touch and dithering academic, Dr Williams has recently found his voice, writes George Pitcher.

George Pitcher
Last Updated: 11:16AM GMT 22 Dec 2008

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If a week is a long time in politics, a year is usually no time at all in the Church of England. But this has been a long year for Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

He had the General Synod vote on women bishops and the 10-yearly Lambeth Conference at Canterbury, both held in high summer and respectively threatening to destroy the Church of England and the Anglican Communion as we know them. Neither of these cataclysms came to pass.

Critics will be divided over the extent to which Dr Williams is to be credited with holding these ancient institutions together. But one thing he is surely to be credited with is holding himself together.

In the first half of the year, he was widely said to be holed beneath the water-line; he was an out-of-touch and dithering academic, who lacked any sense of leadership when what Anglicanism needed was a firm hand on the tiller.

There will be those who hold to that opinion at the close of the year; they will not always be dispassionate observers, of course, since many of them will have a vested interest in the seat of “power” shifting from the Canterbury to the evangelical-traditionalist southern hemisphere, where Africa leads the hard-line reaction to twenty-first century social developments.

But to those who say that Dr Williams is a dialectical vacuum, a silent irrelevance on the peripheries of our issues, there has been an answer in recent months. He has found his voice. At a time of unprecedented economic crisis, when the futures of the developing and developed worlds are empty canvases, we might expect our spiritual, moral and religious leaders to have something to say – and Dr Williams has responded.

Last week, he likened Government policy on public spending to “an addict returning to a drug”. Today, in the Daily Telegraph, Dr Williams warns against the dangers of sticking to political principles at all costs, a road that at its most extreme leads to the kind of abomination that was Nazi Germany and a mindset in which people’s lives are disposable and sacrificed on the altar of those principles.

Dr Williams evokes “the pensioner whose savings have disappeared, the Woolworths employee, the hopeful young executive, let alone the helpless producer of good in some Third-World environment” as some of those who could be sacrificed to economic or political principles.

Whatever we think of his analysis, he is “speaking the truth to power”, as the Quakers are fond of saying. That is a vital role for an Archbishop of Canterbury in this climate and we should welcome that he is doing so.

Lanbeth Conference

convocation at Lambeth Palace, London, that brings together all the bishops in the Anglican Communion. It meets about every 10 years at the invitation of the archbishop of Canterbury and is the principal instrument of international Anglican life, although it has no legislative authority over the national churches. The first convocation was held in 1867, the thirteenth in 1991.

Bibliography

See A. Stephenson, Anglicanism and the Lambeth Conferences (1978).