For three days this week, the 104th archbishop of Canterbury told economists, theologians and others attending a Wall Street conference that the “fat cats” of the world were not necessarily bad people, just victims of a terrible misunderstanding.

The misunderstanding — shared by people with lots of money, people with aspirations of having lots of money and those with neither — is that money is equated with wealth, he said.

And wealth, said the archbishop, Dr Rowan Williams, leader of world’s 80 million Anglicans, is the sum of one’s loving relationships with people. It is not, he said, “the number of naughts on the end of a balance sheet.”

The soft-spoken archbishop, wearing a priest’s collar and scuffed black shoes, was the star attraction at a three-day conference called “Building an Ethical Economy,” sponsored by Trinity Church. It ended on Friday.

He exchanged views with a couple of economists, answered questions from the audience and made thoughtful remarks on a variety of weighty topics, including income distribution, justice, the environment, civic duty, intergenerational responsibility, recovering “the language of virtue” from an ocean of commercial lingo and how Jesus would answer the question, “What does a good life look like?”

“The Gospels give us a good picture of what the good life looks like,” Archbishop Rowan said. It resembles, he said, the disciples, extended family and devoted followers who surrounded Jesus during his ministry — a group of people united by “a common identity shaped by the fact that each depends on all others.”

His audience seemed enraptured.

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