CONNOISSEURS of Archbishops of Canterbury have not had much to rejoice about these last 40 years.

Michael Ramsey, it is true, was an amiable old buffer - even when he was only 40 - and he used to make self-deprecatory jokes about his poor memory. Bob Runcie, who won the MC as a tank commander in the Second World War, was an agreeable man; but his strategy seemed to be the quiet management of decline. This was so coupled with an unwillingness to be forthright about any of the spiritual and moral issues confronting the church that it was famously said of him that he always "nailed his colours firmly to the fence".

The recently-retired George Carey was reckoned by unkind critics to be one or two cucumber sandwiches short of a Sunday School outing - though whenever I met him (as I did now and again in my year as Lord Mayor's Chaplain) he was unfailingly kind and friendly.

Unfortunately, these three archbishops have presided over the demise of the Church of England, albeit at a gentle, almost geriatric, pace. But now we have a man in Canterbury whose public utterances since his appointment threaten to bring down the church with a suddenness not witnessed since the day when Samson, eyeless in Gaza, crashed the twin pillars of Dagon on the Philistines.

I don't know whether you saw Rowan Williams' Dimbleby Lecture on the BBC just before Christmas - or if you managed to stay awake for the duration of it. I have never heard such convoluted speech since the days of the celebrated comic Stanley Unwin. Here was an example, one might say, of English as a foreign language.

What little sense one could gather from the whole performance was that the Wise Men who visited the stable in Bethlehem were the dupes of King Herod, and that it was their "complexity" which led to the massacre of the innocent children. And this was a sort of deconstructed parable which ought to teach us there should be no war on Iraq. Dr Williams is an old-fashioned class warrior. At least give him credit for being honest: he has described himself as "a hairy leftie". That, unfortunately, is probably the only piece of insight he possesses.

In normal times, none of this would matter very much. The last 50 years of church history have been littered with senior ecclesiastical lefties. But these are not normal times: the western world is under threat from insatiable global terrorism. But Dr Williams will not even allow us to describe the terrorists as evil. Instead, he wants us to "understand" the terrorists' motivation. He writes: "We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving no other option."

That is, he thinks the suicide bombers had no choice and the blame for the attacks on the Twin Towers was America's. In the face of such a perverse skewing of reality, one can only plead with all desperation: "God help us all!"

* Peter Mullen is Chaplain of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.