The worst job in the world

Rowan Williams’s successor will have an even harder tenure
Mar 24th 2012
The Economist

CHRISTIANITY’S founder told his disciples to expect tribulation in this world. That has been true for Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Announcing on March 16th that he would step down at the end of the year, he said the next head of the English church and the Anglican Communion would need “the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros.”

Archbishop Williams is agreed to have done a heroic job of holding together the national church and the worldwide communion, at a time when sex and sexuality are tearing them apart. Conservatives liked his deep, theologically grounded faith; liberals, including his gay clerical friends, admired his touchy-feely humanity, although they often felt let down. But the strains are growing unbearable.

Two painful episodes loom for the English church. The leadership will lose its battle to dissuade the government from legalising gay marriage. That will expose the gap between liberal bishops who agree with the government, and hardliners in the evangelical parishes who will wish the church had fought harder. The church is also set to agree to the idea of women bishops, with less generous terms for dissenters than Archbishop Williams would have liked. That will alienate Anglo-Catholics. the rest