THE wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday criticised the excessive pressure to be perfect that is put on families in Western society.

Jane Williams said Christians should not react with “such anger and shock” to the wide varieties of family life now seen in society. And she compared the effects of unfaithfulness and divorce in this country with the ravages of war and Aids on family life around the world.

“Too many of our children are growing up with no models at all of lasting, committed relationships, either in their family or in the community around them,” she said. “What chance will they have of building for themselves something they have never seen?” She also urged churches to stop warring with each other and compared them with couples going through a divorce.

“Some Christian communities are inward-looking and too ready to condemn rather than inspire,” she said. “Some demonstrate a willingness to reject each other and give up on each other that is the exact social mirror of what is going wrong in so many marriages.

“Commitment and a willingness to work through problems and pain together need to be re-learned at all levels of our lives, not just in our personal relationships.”

Although the comparisons between her description of warring churches and the difficulties being faced in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality were clear, Lambeth Palace insisted this was not a direct reference to the warring Anglican provinces.

Mrs Williams, who has two children and is a theologian in her own right, teaching part-time at Trinity College, Bristol, was giving an address at the Mothers’ Union in Westminster to mark the International Year of the Family.

In the lecture, her first since Dr Rowan Williams became Archbishop last year, she said the “family” was near the top of the agenda for the churches and described a “generalised anxiety” about the family.

“We have a faint if not very well substantiated belief that families are more fragile than they have ever been before,” she said. “There is a tendency towards a kind of romantic nostalgia, as there is about the Church, a tendency to believe there was once a time when families worked, and it was probably at the time when everybody went to church.”

Describing the rising expectations of family life, she said: “Our Western society has put intolerable pressures on the family by assuming that it should be all-sufficient and that it should be the basic carrier of Christianity.”

But she said that the task of being, not just a Christian family but any kind of stable family, became much harder “if the things that make families work are not valued or demonstrated in the society in which real families live.”

Mrs Williams continued: “Families can be left with the feeling that the salvation of society rests on their shoulders and that, if only they can get it right, then all will be well. But families are as prone to mistakes as any other corporate body.”

While acknowledging that family-based churches, where everything revolves around children and young mothers, can be vital for mission, she added: “They can often be deeply alienating for those many in our world who are not part of functioning families.”

She continued: “If we value families, we need to build societies in which families can flourish. And that means not putting too much pressure on families to be perfect. Families cannot build our society. Our society needs to build families.”

• Dr Robin Eames, the Archbishop of Armagh, who is chairing the Lambeth Commission set up to resolve the crisis over homosexuality, warned yesterday that the controversy had the potential to damage the mission of the Church.

  Addressing the General Synod of the Church of Ireland in Armagh, he said that conservative and liberal views were being “taken fully into account” by the commission. Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said: “We are praying that the experience here of meditation and the building of trust will bear fruit for our whole church.”

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