Every preacher knows you can’t please everyone. And the Archbishop of Canterbury has just displeased a vocal group of Protestants with his homily yesterday at Lourdes.

From CNS:

Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, England, has come under fire for his homily during a pilgrimage to the Marian sanctuaries in Lourdes, France.

Archbishop Williams, leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said in a homily during a Sept. 24 international Mass at Lourdes that when Mary appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 “she came at first as an anonymous figure, a beautiful lady, a mysterious thing, not yet identified as the Lord’s spotless mother.

“And Bernadette — uneducated, uninstructed in doctrine — leaped with joy, recognizing that here was life, here was healing,” he said. “Only bit by bit does Bernadette find the words to let the world know; only bit by bit, we might say, does she discover how to listen to the Lady and echo what she has to tell us.”

He also praised the lives of the saints, saying that their examples “matter so much.”

The archbishop later was criticized by the England-based Protestant Truth Society, a group of Anglicans and nonconformists committed to upholding the ideals of the Protestant Reformation.

The Rev. Jeremy Brooks, the group’s director of ministry, said: “All true Protestants will be appalled that the archbishop of Canterbury has visited Lourdes and preached there.

“Lourdes represents everything about Roman Catholicism that the Protestant Reformation rejected, including apparitions, Mariolatry and the veneration of saints,” he said in a Sept. 24 statement. “The archbishop’s simple presence there is a wholesale compromise, and his sermon — which included a reference to Mary as ‘the mother of God’ — is a complete denial of Protestant orthodoxy.”

He added, “At a time when our country is crying out for clear biblical leadership, it is nothing short of tragic that our supposedly Protestant archbishop is behaving as little more than a papal puppet.”

Good old reliable Rocco has the full text of the homily.