demonic

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has made a rather startling remark about Church bureaucracy. He was in a conversation at Unherd about evil and the demonic in culture—especially “the erosion of standards of truthfulness in public life and the normalisation of violence in word and deed”. And he was also worried about a church “too preoccupied with strategy — with schemes for solving problems — and not preoccupied enough with its own integrity as a community of witness and prayer.” Was this, too, demonic? “In a word, yes”, explaining that the diabolical is a “pull to the destructive and towards a kind of idolatry of the self and the corporate self and its well-being and security and control.”

I know very well that Williams intensely dislikes bureaucracy and ‘managerialism’; I learnt it from him in personal conversation, but also from observation when I joined the Archbishops’ Council just over ten years ago. The Council then appeared to have inherited a fairly chaotic set-up, and despite significant improvements, I still have major questions about its effectiveness.