by David Virtue, VOL
SIMPLER, HUMBLER, DODGIER
Archbishop of York’s Farewell Address to Synod Is a Masterclass in Saying Nothing Beautifully
The Archbishop of York rose in York on Friday to deliver his final presidential address of the quinquennium, and it must be said at the outset: the man is good at this. Stephen Cottrell has spent five years perfecting a rhetorical form all his own — the address that absorbs every criticism, confesses every failure, and leaves no one, least of all the speaker, as the subject of an accountable sentence. Friday’s performance was the finest of the genre. It deserves to be studied, the way one studies a conjuror: not for what appears, but for what disappears.
Let us count the vanishings.
THE HUMBLING WITHOUT A HUMBLER
The address’s emotional centerpiece is a line Cottrell has been polishing for years and readily admits to repeating: he prayed the Church of England might become a humbler church, and never realized the prayer would be answered by the church being humbled.
It is a lovely line. Note the grammar. Being humbled — by whom? The passive voice has no agent, and that is the point. The Church of England was not humbled by an act of mysterious providence. It was humbled by the Makin review’s findings on John Smyth. It was humbled by the resignation of an Archbishop of Canterbury. It was humbled by the David Tudor case — the abuser whose appointment as Area Dean was twice renewed at Chelmsford under the man now speaking. It was humbled by a serving diocesan bishop, Helen-Ann Hartley of Newcastle, declaring publicly that Cottrell’s own position was untenable and that the institution was hemorrhaging credibility.
None of this appears in the address. Not Smyth, not Makin, not Tudor, not the resignation calls against the speaker himself. In their place stands an answered prayer. This is theodicy as public relations: institutional and personal culpability transubstantiated into the gentle discipline of a loving God. The Almighty, it turns out, makes an excellent press officer.