Church of England confesses and apologizes

I received this article just moments ago and was instantly inspired to blog about it. A Black Britain article reports that The Church of England has voted to apologize to the descendants of slaves for its role in the slave trade.

To be honest – I am impressed. Of course the apology is necessary, but I’m just impressed that the Church of England had the chutzpah to do it. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, confessed that the apology was necessary. Williams went on to say:

“The body of Christ is not just a body that exists at any one time, it exists across history and we therefore share the shame and the sinfulness of our predecessors and part of what we can do, with them and for them in the body of Christ, is prayer for acknowledgement of the failure that is part of us not just of some distant ‘them’.”

Though some label him a weak leader, I think I like this Archbishop Williams guy. Apparently, he kicked up some dirt in November 2005 after saying missionaries sinned by teaching indigenous people from other lands the Catholic hymns saying that they were making “cultural captives” of them. Williams said:

“In all sorts of ways the Church over the centuries has lent itself to the error, indeed the sin, of trying to make cultural captives, whether it is the mass export of Hymns Ancient and Modern to the remote parts of the mission field, or the abiding colonial shadow, the shadow of the British Empire that still hangs over our Communion.”

Well, now I’m very curious as to what type of ripple effect this will have in the U.S.

AND

How long it will take for the U.S. Government to apologize for slavery as well?

(smiling – blinking slowly – and looking off into the utopian distance)

SNAP OUT OF IT! Oh..um..yea……sorry about that – I’m back.

I got a bit too idealistic with that latter question. If the U.S. had the canoles to storm out of the United Nations Conference Against Racism, I’m sure that apologizing to the descendants of enslaved people isn’t high on their priority list.

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