He said he's encountered it in the death of a friend and sat by a lonely bedside in South Wales waiting for someone to die. He also spoke of a day spent with caregivers and counselors and people living with HIV in London.

He said the Church has engaged "bravely and imaginatively" in responding to the pandemic. He praised the work of the Mothers' Union, Christian Aid, and Tearfund, particularly in Africa. The Church's "universal reach in African society" gives it a capacity that few others can emulate.

The Church has nothing to be complacent about, he said.

Then he said this: "We have to acknowledge that there are aspects of our language and our practice that have certainly not made the struggle against HIV and AIDs any easier."

What exactly does this statement mean?

Did the archbishop in fact take a stance? Maybe.

The truth is the archbishop has taken two stances, stances mutually contradictory, which all depend on how you decode what he says.

Everything hinges on which aspects of language and which practices we imagine His Grace has in mind.

An orthodox Christian could read his statement to mean, "Equivocal moral discourse and laxity in conduct have fostered a sexual recklessness conducive to AIDS." A gay activist could equally take the words to say, "Judgmental attitudes toward promiscuity make it hard to turn AIDS into a PR coup for homosexuals." Whichever the struggle, it has not been made easier.

This might explain why this deft trick with language makes Dr. Williams an archbishop not you and I.

According to a Roman Catholic source, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was the pre-eminent master of this linguistic stunt on that side of the fence.

The language doesn't sound like fence-straddling of course; one's initial impression is that a forceful statement has been made.

Only as one reflects on his words, that the truth of what he crafted and communicated are two forceful statements of exactly contrary thrust.

He urged: "The suffering and privation by extension of any part of the human family is everybody's issue. It is in recognizing that that we find our deepest, most lasting motivation for responding creatively and lovingly to this challenge."

But is it "everybody's issue"? Is cancer "everybody's issue"? Is alcoholism "everybody's issue"? Is pedophilia "everybody's issue"? Surely this is an overstatement. My brother-in-law died of AIDS, should we dump this "issue" on all our neighbors? I think not.

This reminds me of a statement made by an Episcopal AIDS activist and former TEC "missionary" to the Province of Southern Africa who stood up in Hong Kong at a meeting of Primates and in front of George Carey cried "the Church has AIDS".

Does it really? His point was to make us all feel guilty about men who willingly have anal sex and then contract HIV/AIDS...and we should feel guilty because we haven't thrown millions of dollars at it looking for a solution when he could have just as easily chosen not to indulge himself. Abstinence is not even on the radar screen of American Episcopalians even though it has been successfully deployed in Uganda by the Anglican Province through the ABC program.

So the whole church is made to feel guilty for the sins of the few. (We shall discount those who got HIV/AIDS through non-sexual encounters like blood transfusions.)

Should we therefore ignore the millions who have AIDS? Of course not. The church should be doing something about it and it is. One admires the way pastor Rick Warren has reached out with his millions to fight AIDS in Rwanda! It is vital that churches join in the fight against HIV, both against the stigma that attaches to people with the virus, and to help prevent its onward transmission.

Here again, there is a not so subtle decoding of language necessary in the use of the word "stigma". Behind this word "stigma" lies the concept of guilt, guilt no one is supposed to have or prepared to admit, nor of course should we make anyone feel guilty who indulges in anal sex and contracts the virus. In the bad old days, the church talked about sexual sin. Not any more. We never see or hear those two words put together in the same sentence, especially when it comes to how HIV/AIDS is transmitted. (In fact I have not even heard an orthodox rector put those two words together in 20 years!)

The truth is we are all being made to feel guilty about AIDS, not just those who have gotten the disease through sexual misbehavior.

No one is telling those with HIV/AIDS to repent of their behavior and start a new life. That is verboten. We must feel their pain of exclusion. We must be made to feel guilty for something we have never done (I have enough real sin to feel guilty about, I don't need the stigma of AIDS added onto it) by those who have done it.

Of course all the millions of dollars the Episcopal Church is spending on lawyers to retain empty church properties could be usefully put to work buying ADIS drugs, but we know that won't happen.

The words of Dr. Williams leave us high and dry. What exactly did he mean? If I were a betting man, I would say he was coming down on the side of activist homosexuals and telling them you are not to blame, we (heterosexuals) are to blame and we truly repent. I for one won't join him.

END