Theologian in peril

Fr Timothy Radcliffe is a well known to Anglicans. A former Master of the Dominicans and friend of Rowan Williams, he was a special adviser at the 2008 Lambeth Conference where his contributions were widely welcomed. He has spoken to a number of Anglican colleges and parishes and his books are widely read. On the liberal wing of Catholicism he has not been appointed a bishop and at 69 may now be too old even though the climate appears to be changing in his favour. But Fr Timothy had a narrow escape on a recent trip to Algeria to visit the community of Little Brothers in the Sahara. Rioters tried to ambush the car in which Dominican friar and the Bishop were travelling. Timothy tried to engage one of the rioters holding a large stone with his eye so that he would recognise another human being ‘maybe like his favourite uncle’ but the bishop spotted a gap in the crowd, jammed his foot on the accelerator and managed to drive away. “If we had delayed even more than 20 seconds we would have been caught. And I have no idea what would have happened then,” Timothy confessed. He added: “It is a minor incident. The kind of thing missionaries often endure.”