Exit the Archbishop

Rowan Williams leaves the Church of England and the Anglican Communion with some unresolved questions.
By John O'Sullivan, NRO
March 19, 2012

The first thing to be said about Dr. Rowan Williams is that he is by common consent a subtle theologian, a sensitive pastoral priest, and a genuinely good and holy man, because a great many less flattering things will be said about him in the next few months, some of them further down this column. Dr. Williams announced last Friday that he intended to resign at the end of the year as Archbishop of Canterbury and therefore as spiritual leader of the Church of England and, by extension, of the 77 million–strong Anglican Communion around the world.

His announcement came as a surprise. He had been appointed archbishop only ten years ago at the age of 52. As archbishops go, he was a mere stripling. The general expectation had been that he would serve a good round 20 years before handing in his miter. But when the initial shock had faded, his resignation seemed, however regrettably, the right decision.

His tenure had been littered with avoidable errors — mainly bold statements that needed immediate corrections that themselves then needed further corrections. He was the angel who rushed in where journalists, policemen, politicians, and cynics of every kind feared to tread. He would then fall with innocent surprise through a series of trapdoors marked “partisan politics,” “Islam,” and, riskiest of all, “sexual politics.”

The trapdoor through which he plunged most frequently was partisan politics. Like almost all Anglican bishops, he was a man of the Left, and his political sermons reflected the fact. Like his fellow bishops too, he seemed more self-confident breezily issuing pronouncements on political questions than agonizing over religious ones. the rest