The words of Jayne Ozanne, a senior figure in the Church of England and a departing member of the Archbishops’ Council, are, as we report today, stark to the point of apocalyptic. She writes of a “time of great persecution coming, which will drive Christianity all but underground in the West”. She refers to an established Church that “will continue to implode and self-destruct”. She concludes that her Church “bears all the hallmarks of an underground movement, indeed it will become an underground resistance movement”. It can be assumed this is not the sort of language that the Archbishop of Canterbury would normally wish to peruse in his morning newspaper.

In truth, Ms Ozanne has probably not helped her own cause by casting her argument in such dramatic terms. While there are many in the Church of England who are deeply disturbed at its direction, few of them would be comfortable with the notion that Christianity in Europe is fast reverting to a status that it held almost two millennia ago — oppressed by the authorities, obliged to operate in secrecy. There is the risk that a few brutal phrases will diminish the credibility of her broader analysis. That would be unfortunate. For on closer inspection, her case is stronger and more subtle than it might initially seem. When she refers to the “persecution” of Christians in Europe, she means a process by which believers would be “ridiculed for their faith and pressured into making it a purely private matter”. This is not a ludicrous supposition. Some would say, after the Buttiglione saga, that this state of affairs already exists.

Similarly, when she predicts that the Anglican Church will “continue to implode and self-destruct”, she cites a series of reasons for this with which a number of lay members of the Church might empathise. She is critical of a leadership which appears to “shy away from admitting there is any absolute truth” and one which, in an attempt to maintain a happy camp, ends up seeking “to promote a gospel that is socially acceptable to all”. She herself believes in the “transformative power” of the Holy Spirit, but laments that this is “something we are not keen to talk openly about in the Church of England”. She yearns for a quite different approach, one with “a faith that was more contagious in its intensity”.

Ms Ozanne is from the conservative evangelical branch of the Church and perhaps has a set of scars from the battles over the appointment, which was eventually abandoned, of a homosexual man as Bishop of Reading and the successful ordination of a gay bishop in New Hampshire. She should not, nevertheless, be dismissed as simply a factional figure determined to impose her idea of Anglicanism on the rest of the flock. It is perfectly possible to hold different theological views and suspect she is right when insisting that on present trends “many will continue to leave — disaffected and dismayed”.

If Rowan Williams were allowed a right of reply, he might protest that his critics were better at highlighting problems than in identifying solutions. It is the task of the Archbishop of Canterbury to try to maintain the broadest of churches and not to be the catalyst for schism. The Archbishop is thought to be suppressing his private views on, in particular, homosexual clerics, in order to maintain unity. This is a noble endeavour. But as this broadside from Ms Ozanne indicates, it is becoming yet more difficult for this Archbishop to keep his Church together.