Jesus would spend Christmas with the St Paul’s Cathedral protesters, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.
Dr Rowan Williams declared that Christ would be ‘there, sharing the risks, not just taking sides.’
He said in an article aimed at the huge audience of buyers of the Christmas edition of the Radio Times that Jesus ‘is somebody who constantly asks awkward questions’.
The Archbishop said: ‘Christmas doesn’t commemorate the birth of a super-good person who shows us how to get it right every time, but the arrival in the world of someone who tells us that everything could be different.’
Dr Williams’ move to link the St Paul’s protest with Christmas follows his decision last month to give his personal backing to the cathedral campers.
He said last month that their demonstration expressed ‘a widespread and deep exasperation with the financial establishment.’
The St Paul’s protest claimed the scalps of three clerics during its first few days in October. Among them were Dean of St Paul’s, the Very Rev Graeme Knowles and the cathedral’s Canon Chancellor, Dr Giles Fraser.
Dr Fraser’s career, however, appears to be reviving – he is a key figure in a Church committee set up to negotiate with the campers.
Since then the continued presence of the protesters has led to deepening controversy. There have been allegations of drug abuse in the camp and of the defacing by demonstrators of parts of the cathedral.
Last week protesters were reported to have been split by an angry row over control of the £25,000 given to them by well-wishers.
Protesters at the Occupy London camp outside St Paul's Cathedral. During the ongoing protests there have been allegations of drug abuse and damage to the cathedral
The City of London is making legal moves towards removing the protest camp, but demonstrators appear determined to stay on the Cathedral steps until the Olympics next summer and beyond.
Dr Williams said in his article: ‘One of the slogans on the posters and banners in front of St Paul’s Cathedral has been “What would Jesus do?”
‘This started life in the US some years ago, with people wearing wristbands with WWJD on them. It’s one of those things that looks wonderfully obvious, a quick way to the right answer.’
He added that when Jesus said ‘give Caesar what belongs to Caesar’, he meant to ask ‘what’s the exact point at which involvement in the empire of capitalist economy compromises you fatally?’
The Archbishop said the challenge of Christ’s life and death was: ‘What if all your standards of success and failure are upside down?’
The Archbishop supports a 'Robin Hood tax' on banking transactions 'to take seriously the moral agenda of the protesters at St Paul's'
‘WWJD? He’d first of all be there: sharing the risks, not just taking sides but steadily changing the entire atmosphere by the questions he asks of everybody involved, rich and poor, capitalist and protester and cleric.’
Dr Williams said that ‘the Jesus we meet in the Bible is somebody who constantly asks awkward questions (especially questions addressed to religious people, moral people and rich people – all the sorts of people involved at St Paul’s) rather than just giving us a model of good behaviour.’
The Archbishop said last month that he supported a ‘Robin Hood tax’ on banking transactions as a means ‘to take seriously the moral agenda of the protesters at St Paul’s.’
France and Germany are pressing hard for such a tax to be imposed across Europe, but the Coalition says it will not penalise the City unless similar taxes are imposed across the world.
The Christmas Radio Times is thought to sell double the magazine’s usual circulation of just under a million and could be expected to give the Archbishop a potential audience of six million readers.
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