Rowan Williams is to step down as Archbishop of Canterbury in December this year.
It is a sad and ignominious end to an archepiscopal ministry which promised so much at the beginning and was met by great excitement. It will be hard for anyone to see his departure and particularly the timing of the announcement as anything other than a defeat.
I remember rejoicing so greatly when Rowan Williams was appointed. He seemed to have the intellect, the skills, the diplomacy and the gravitas. He also was on record as being supportive to causes I cared about, not least in his support of gay clergy in Wales and the fact that his own articles had been used to justify the inevitable move towards the public acknowledgement of those faithful gay folk which God has been embedding in the church for decades.
How wrong I was. In the end, Rowan Williams exercised his ministry on the principle that a particular form of church unity (and not one that was accepted by everyone by any means) trumped every other consideration. Personal loyalties were put aside. Personal convictions were shelved. Personal integrity was mangled in unseemly public displays of incompetence.
Rowan Williams’s obvious intellectual gifts were squandered in an environment which rewards the streetwise rather than the wise. This was most notable when he made ill advised comments about Sharia law being incorporated into UK law.
It is to his credit that the Archbishop of Canterbury has remained stately and dignified in public. However, the revelations surrounding his behaviour in private over episcopal appointments (the Colin Slee Memo) showed that beneath the surface lurked something more visceral and a good deal less pleasant.
Ultimately though, Rowan Williams will be remembered for the consequences of one decision and one decision alone – the sacrifice of his friend Jeffrey John who had been appointed as an area bishop in the Diocese of Oxford but not yet consecrated. The decision to deprive Dr John of his appointment in the face of a nasty campaign (later repented of by some) against him was to dog every subsequent day of his archepiscopate.
Once it had been established that Rowan Williams was prepared to lay down his friend for his life he could win nothing. Liberals and moderates suddenly realised that he was untrustworthy and believed him to have acted wickedly. Conservatives had known he was untrustworthy already but now knew they could bully him. And those who loved him (and these remain considerable in their defence of him yet) were bewildered at how this had all come to pass.
For many years matters were blamed on Lambeth Palace advisers whom he had inherited from George Carey. Then it was that Rowan simply believed in holding the church together so much that he was apparently prepared to do anything to ensure it did not split up on his watch.
History will judge whether he has succeeded.
It is hard to believe today that he has.
His resignation (or stepping down as we are to call it) comes at a time when his own authority had come under greater personal challenge than ever with the Church of England dioceses refusing to fall into line and endorse the Anglican Covenant which had been sold by Rowan Williams as the only game in town to keep the church together.
Fortunately for the Churches of the Anglican Communion there have been enough people prepared to call his bluff. The appearance this morning of a blog article by an English bishop describing the Covenant as a chocolate teapot on a hob which needed a good Christian burial shows the righteous contempt felt by its opponents.
Rowan Williams was dealt a weak hand – Akinola, Carey, Jefferts Schori and all the rest must have bewildered him in their contradictions. However, my suspicion is that he made bad situations worse and weakened the resolve of those who could help him.
The time comes now to move on. Either the Communion will survive or it will fail. I suspect that it will survive though there might be fractures along the way. That might be the best that can be.
The task for Archbishop Rowan’s successor is immense. The main criterion for success is the ability to retain personal integrity in the face of corrupting and malign powers. The secondary task though is to do the job in such a way as to ensure that one can leave well.
In this, as in so many ways, Archbishop Rowan Williams has failed.
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