The Archbishop of Canterbury has displayed a munificent turning of the other cheek in response to what many see as a move by the Pope to annex part of his Church. No one doubts his Christian holiness.
But a bit more muscular Christianity would not go amiss.
In Rome this week he might do better to ask himself not “What would Jesus do?” but “What would Thomas Cromwell do?”
Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, a fictionalised memoir of Henry VIII’s Reformation enforcer, has important lessons for Dr Rowan Williams.
The man who did much to create the Church of England has gone down in history as a pugnacious monster but the Cromwell who emerges from the book is merely tough and resourceful.
From humble beginnings, he climbed to the top of Tudor society. He was a maker and breaker of rivals, outwitting them at every turn.
If Benedict XVI has displayed something of his rottweiler tendencies, cloaked in the most decorative of chasubles, Dr Williams now needs to unleash his inner bulldog.
History is strewn with martyrs. Archbishops of Canterbury no longer get their head chopped off but, for all the polite ecumenical dialogue, beneath the gold-embroidered cloths the altars are as bloody as ever.
Holding his hands up in helpless resignation while Rome walks off with his traditionalists is not going to earn the Church of England the respect that it deserves and that was hard won by the likes of Cromwell.
The “natural and humble obedience” of which Cromwell so powerfully wrote does not preclude a decent bit of backbone, as he himself bore witness, to the death.
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