TIME magazine’s David Van Biema and Catharine Mayer have written a cover story on the 
Archbishop of Canterbury. It appears in this week’s European and South Pacific editions. The article will likely become the one piece that readers new to the turmoil in the Angican Communion will want to read for a quick, but fairly comprehensive grasp on the situation. It is followed by an in-depth interview (that will probably be of more interest to Communion watchers) in which Williams spells out his reasons for inviting neither Bishops Gene Robinson nor Martyn Minns to the Lambeth Conference.
A few excerpts and quotes worth perusing before you click “Read more” to see the whole thing:
On Peter Akinola:
The Archbishop is weary of being pushed around. The pusher-in-chief, of course, especially since the founding of CANA, has been Akinola. ‘I’ve said to him privately and publicly I don’t think that [CANA] was an appropriate response,’ says Williams. He is also bothered by the unwavering support by Akinola’s church of a proposed Nigerian law, now lapsed, that would have assigned a five-year jail term not only to open homosexuals, but to those who supported them. Williams says he is ‘very unhappy’ about the situation, ‘and I’ve written to the Archbishop about it.”
On Gene Robinson:
“Regarding Robinson, one thing I’ve tried to make clear is that my worry about his election was that the Episcopal Church hadn’t made a general principled decision about the blessing of same-sex unions or the ordination of people in public same-sex partnerships. I would think it better had the church actually taken a view on that before moving to the individual case. As it is, someone living in a relationship not theologically officially approved by the church is elected to a bishop — I find that bizarre and puzzling.”
On the Episcopal Church’s response to the Primates’ communique from Dar es Salaam:
TIME: The Anglican primates met in Dar es Salaam in February and made three key recommendations to the American bishops: that they stop ordaining gay bishops and blessing gay unions and that they create a special bishop to serve the needs of conservatives. What happens if they refuse?
Williams: An absolute blanket no to all of this would pose a real problem. We’ve had indications of a cautious yes to part of it.
Rowan Williams on homosexuality, the risk of a schism and hope
In an exclusive interview with TIME, his last before a three-month leave, the Archbishop Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, describes the Anglican Communion as ‘very fragile’ — and explains how he hopes to reconcile its bitter factions
For his last official act before a three-month sabbatical, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams chose a joyous one. He ordained the Reverend Canon Humphrey Southern as a new bishop. The ceremony took place in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the crowd smiled to see Williams, the tousle-headed, professorial leader of the Church of England and titular head of its global offshoot, the Anglican Communion, reveling in his mellifluous baritone as he prayed, sang and performed the rite of ordination. ‘Will you strive for the visible unity of Christ’s Church?’ asked Williams. Answered Southern, ‘By the help of God, I will.’
By the help of God, indeed. Almost from the day he took over in 2002, Williams, now 56, has been attempting to prevent a schism among the world’s 79 million Anglicans. It has been a horrible task. Within months of his taking the job, a simmering debate on homosexuality exploded into a brutal battle, pitting some of the wealthiest and most liberal of the church’s 38 provinces, notably those in North America, against a larger, more socially conservative group concentrated in Africa and Asia and known as the Global South. At the 1998 edition of the Communion’s once-a-decade Lambeth Conference, the concluding language called homosexual practice ‘incompatible with Scripture.’ But in 2003 the Episcopal Church, the Anglican body in the U.S., made Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, bishop of New Hampshire. Unlike Roman Catholicism, the Communion lacks definitive doctrine to aid decisive solutions. Nor does it have a universal leader such as the Pope — the Archbishop makes no claims to infallibility and cannot dictate to his flock. The years since have featured a series of angry meetings, threats of secession, half-met demands and unmet deadlines. The next full-scale opportunity to negotiate — or fight on — will be at the Lambeth meeting in July 2008: that is, if Williams can keep all parties on board long enough to attend it.
Anglicanism matters, and not just because it is one of the largest Protestant denominations. It matters because, like Roman Catholicism, it is global, uniting varied ethnicities, economic levels and social attitudes in an overarching understanding of faith. But Anglicans have foregone Catholicism’s useful authoritarianism, staking their unity on a seemingly more attractive continual conversation, based on mutual respect. The sharp debate over homosexuality threatens that unity, and crystallizes a challenge facing everyone in an uneasy, newly wired world: can the North — rich and imbued with an ethos of individual rights — and the poorer South find a constructive interdependence?
The Archbishop’s office is arguably ill-equipped for that challenge. A job sometimes described as ‘first among equals’ now looks more like lion-tamer-minus-whip. Some think Williams should step back and let the rift happen. ‘No one is up to this, however gifted they may be,’ says Chris Sugden, executive secretary of the group Anglican Mainstream. Then again, Mainstream is a very conservative group that might prefer an immediate split; and if the Communion disintegrates, it is not Sugden who could be known forever as its last Archbishop of Canterbury. Says Bishop Idris Jones, Primate of the Scottish Episcopal Church, ‘You could say [Williams] is occupying the Christlike position. He is crucified between two extremes and they’re pulling him apart.’
In the last few weeks, however, Williams has been intriguingly proactive, doling out penalties to a couple of notable thorns on either side of the debate, and possibly finessing a decent attendance for Lambeth 2008. Speaking to Time on a cool May morning, a fire burning in the hearth of his study in Lambeth Palace, his London seat, Williams admitted: ‘The Communion feels very vulnerable; very vulnerable and very fragile.’ But he insisted, ‘I don’t think schism is inevitable.’ He said his task was to ‘try and maintain as long as possible the space in which people can have constructive disagreements, learn from each other, and try and hold that within an agreed framework of discipline and practice.’ Yet not everyone will be happy to follow his example. For in his pursuit of unity, Williams effectively banked down his own, rather liberal, views about homosexuality and the church. He may ask no less from the liberal provinces in the Communion.
Back in 2002, Rowan Williams was something of a prodigy. At 52, he became the youngest Archbishop of Canterbury in 200 years. ‘And,’ wrote one observer, ‘perhaps the cleverest,’ a man who had quickly established himself as one of Anglicanism’s most gifted preachers and probably its pre-eminent theologian. He was a self-professed ‘hairy lefty,’ a Christian socialist arrested in a 1985 protest at a U.S. air base in England, who now criticizes the Iraq war. And he once also had a controversial stance on the theology of sexuality. In 1989 he delivered a lecture to Britain’s Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in which he stated: ‘If we are looking for a sexual ethic that can be seriously informed by our Bible, there is a good deal to steer us away from assuming that reproductive sex is a norm.’ He continued: ‘The absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory.’ As Archbishop of Wales he admitted knowingly ordaining at least one noncelibate gay man. When he moved with his wife and two children to Lambeth Palace in 2002, the Herald newspaper of Glasgow enthused, ‘What will endear him to the people … is that he has the courage of his convictions, however unpopular they may be.’
But his convictions turned out to be complex, and not everybody was endeared. Until July 2003, Williams seemed prepared to make Canon Jeffrey John, an openly gay man in a committed, celibate relationship, a bishop. But after a tremendous outcry on the right, Williams held a six-hour meeting with John, who withdrew his candidacy. Williams had already called an emergency meeting of the Anglican leadership over the U.S. Episcopal Church’s election of Gene Robinson, also gay and in a committed relationship, as bishop of New Hampshire. The months that followed set a pattern. The Americans consecrated Robinson. Williams, facing conservative demands that they leave the Communion, endorsed milder requests such as a promise, for now, to make no more gay bishops and bless no more gay marriages. The Episcopalians made ambiguous gestures of compliance, but in 2006 elected as their presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who had supported Robinson’s elevation. Today Williams calls Robinson’s election — absent any prior general decision allowing the ordination of people in same-sex relationships — ‘bizarre and puzzling.’ ‘His heart is where it’s always been,’ says Welsh Archbishop Barry Morgan, a good friend. ‘His natural sympathies and theological understanding are on the side of those who are gay.’ And yet Williams insists that churches should not outpace the Communion’s consensus.
Many old allies, Williams admits, saw his shift on gays as a ‘betrayal.’ One British gay-rights activist snapped: ‘I hope he likes his newfound friends.’ But in fact, he has few on the right. ‘He’s a very courteous man,’ says Morgan. ‘Sometimes the nuanced way in which he says things is lost on people.’ Certainly it is lost on archconservative Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, who has said that God regards homosexuality as the equivalent of humans having sex with various animals, and who has commented, ‘We don’t have to go through Canterbury to get to Jesus.’ He also set up his own Anglican body in the U.S. — the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (cana) — flouting Communion rules about stealing other bishops’ sheep. Last February, when top Anglican archbishops gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Akinola extracted major concessions despite initial deft handling by Williams. The gathering attached a strict deadline — Sept. 30 — to the usual cease-and-desist demands on the Americans, and added one more: that they arrange with the Communion for a ‘primatial vicar’ to provide religious leadership for disgruntled conservatives, an idea the U.S. Episcopalians rejected almost instantly. Williams’ reputation sank further.
Last spring was a nadir. Williams was widely reported as feeling isolated and depressed. Just before Easter, retired bishop Richard Harries described a meeting of the Church of England’s House of Bishops at which Williams ‘simply shared what was on his heart for more than an hour … and one tough-minded bishop … was reduced to tears.’ An unnamed former bishop earlier had offered the press an image of an endless via dolorosa: ‘He’s just carrying the cross, hoping things will change.’
‘I think it’s a rather dramatic picture painted there,’ Williams told Time. ‘Making decisions that will lose you friends, compromise people’s perception of your integrity — that’s very hard. On the other hand, that is only part of the reality. First and foremost, I’m a priest and a bishop.’
Up close, Williams is yet more benignly rumpled than at a distance. White hair springs out in every direction; wild black eyebrows seem to try to unseat his spectacles. Sitting next to a reporter, he affects the solicitous slump of a tutor assisting a student. His answers, however, are precise and confident. And indeed, he has some reason to be satisfied. One of his few direct powers is to determine who gets invited to the Lambeth conference. Many expected him to wait until after the Episcopalians’ September deadline, and then — if they proved noncompliant — disinvite the entire American contingent. Instead, he announced in May that, for now, he was excluding just two people: Robinson alone of the Episcopalians; and Martyn Minns, the bishop of Akinola’s U.S. church. If either attended Lambeth, he said, the conference would risk being just about them.
It was, of course, a gamble. Akinola threatened to pull his country’s 90-some bishops out of Lambeth. Robinson said he hoped that the U.S. church as a whole (with its 111 dioceses) would ‘respond’ to his exclusion. But the act of self-assertion seems to have energized Williams. As his hearth logs crackled, it became clear that he saw himself, the U.S. Episcopalians and Akinola as facing the same broad challenge: in the absence of bright guidelines, to subsume their more extreme philosophical impulses to the preservation of Anglicanism’s unique assets. As for their real differences, Williams cited a theology he says springs from the Apostle Paul’s reference to the church as the ‘body of Christ’: God intends that people in one church ‘have something to learn even from the people we most dislike or instinctively mistrust. ‘Here they are. In an ideal world, no doubt I’d have chosen differently, but it wasn’t up to me.’’
So although he says he’s ‘not recanting’ his old arguments about homosexuality, his new job demands that he express ‘where the consensus of our Church is,’ rather than press for change. Even though Williams himself doesn’t see sexuality as of ‘first-order’ theological importance, he believes so many Christians do that pro-gay measures must be preceded by a broad shift in consensus. He portrays the U.S. church as having failed at this — and Robinson’s election as perhaps dangerously myopic. Williams reports complaints from Egyptian Christians that their churches are being denounced — or, he hints, threatened — by Muslim clergy because of same-sex relationships, even though the local Christians themselves have never accepted their validity. Williams would like to see a ‘covenant’ or set of core Anglican principles. U.S. Episcopalians have criticized this as a move aimed at forcing liberal churches into Roman-style lockstep, and he acknowledged it could eventually isolate the American church’s current stance on homosexuality. ‘I don’t want to accelerate departure, God forbid,’ he says, adding that he hopes both the Episcopalians and others could benefit if their positions changed.
The Archbishop is weary of being pushed around. The pusher-in-chief, of course, especially since the founding of CANA, has been Akinola. ‘I’ve said to him privately and publicly I don’t think that [CANA] was an appropriate response,’ says Williams. He is also bothered by the unwavering support by Akinola’s church of a proposed Nigerian law, now lapsed, that would have assigned a five-year jail term not only to open homosexuals, but to those who supported them. Williams says he is ‘very unhappy’ about the situation, ‘and I’ve written to the Archbishop about it.’
The Anglican parties have talked fairly little, thus far, about the collateral damage if the Communion does dissolve — but it would be real. Valuable links between rich and poor nations would be broken, and people would suffer while northern cash is seeking new conduits to southern need. There will be expensive litigation. That is not to say that the principles of gay rights or biblical fidelity may not be worth the possible costs. But Williams cautions: ‘There are no clean breaks. It’s not as if [the Communion would] just snap apart like a dry biscuit.’
Two weeks after Williams’ offsetting penalties on Robinson and Minns, it looks as though his gamble may have paid off. Although Ugandan Archbishop Henry Orombi said he would join Akinola’s boycott of the Lambeth conference, Archbishop Drexel Gomez of the West Indies, an influential Global South leader, told Time his contingent will attend. Liberal Washington bishop John Chane said that he will probably skip the conference out of loyalty to Robinson, but ‘I think the American church will be well represented … [and] I think it’s important. I don’t see a walkout.’
This should please the Archbishop, who is now engaged in a little light recreation, working on a book about Fyodor Dostoevsky at Georgetown University in Washington. He will emerge from his studies slightly before the Communion’s next likely crisis: the Americans’ September deadline on the Dar es Salaam ‘recommendations.’ Whatever happens then, Williams will probably keep plugging along. He is ‘hopeful,’ he told Time, but not ‘absolutely confident’ that the whole structure of Anglicanism can be kept together. And if it should fall apart around his shoulders, leaving him standing in the rubble of his calling? Would he be able to sustain the blow? ‘Well, yes,’ Williams said, and then took a long pause. ‘Yes. Because I trust my God and I believe that whatever mistakes I make and whatever disasters may occur, there is always grace.’
with reporting by Michael Brunton/London and Jeff Israely/Rome
TIME: Many in the Anglican Communion feel it’s hurtling toward schism, with you trying in vain to hold it together.
Williams: I don’t think schism is inevitable. The task I’ve got is to try and maintain as long as possible the space in which people can have constructive disagreements, learn from each other, and try and hold that within an agreed framework of discipline and practice. It feels very vulnerable. I can’t, of course, deny that. It feels very vulnerable and very fragile, perhaps more so than it’s been for a very long time.
TIME: You’ve issued invitations for next summer’s once-a-decade Lambeth Conference, but left out Gene Robinson, the gay Episcopalian bishop of New Hampshire, and Martyn Minns, from the Convocation of Anglicans in North America. So you’ve excluded an emblematic liberal and an emblematic conservative.
Williams: Of course, exclusion is not particularly a Gospel idea. The election and ordination of Gene Robinson was an event which many in the Communion had warned would deepen our divisions. Similarly, with Martyn Minns, there had been warnings that [his missionary assignment in the U.S.] looked like a kind of aggression against another Anglican province. I felt we would run the risk of their attendance becoming the subject matter of the conference.
TIME: Surely as bishops they are entitled to attend?
Williams: The mode of their appointment in the face of substantial protest simply means their bishoping is going to be under question in large parts of the Anglican world. Regarding Robinson, one thing I’ve tried to make clear is that my worry about his election was that the Episcopal Church hadn’t made a general principled decision about the blessing of same-sex unions or the ordination of people in public same-sex partnerships. I would think it better had the church actually taken a view on that before moving to the individual case. As it is, someone living in a relationship not theologically officially approved by the church is elected to a bishop — I find that bizarre and puzzling.
TIME: The Anglican primates met in Dar es Salaam in February and made three key recommendations to the American bishops: that they stop ordaining gay bishops and blessing gay unions and that they create a special bishop to serve the needs of conservatives. What happens if they refuse?
Williams: An absolute blanket no to all of this would pose a real problem. We’ve had indications of a cautious yes to part of it.
TIME: The Episcopal Church reacted angrily to the communiqué.
Williams: It was seen as interference and colonialism. I was a bit taken aback because I didn’t see it as the primates trying to dictate terms, but to say, look, here is a scheme which we think you could work with. But I’ve occasionally thought — rather mischievously — that the issue could be described [to the Americans] in terms of a good American slogan: No taxation without representation. That is, in some parts of the world, the decisions of the Episcopal Church are [incorrectly] taken to be decisions that the local Anglican Church owns and agrees to, and the local church can suffer in reputation or worse because of that.
TIME: Can you give us an example?
Williams:In Egypt there have been denunciations of all Christian churches from the Friday pulpits for sanctioning same-sex relationships.
TIME: Isn’t the Scripture straightforward on homosexuality?
Williams: It’s impossible to get from Scripture anything straightforwardly positive about same-sex relationships. So if there were any other way of approaching it, you’d have to go back to the first principle of human relationships. Those theologians who’ve defended same-sex relationships from the Christian point of view in recent decades have said you’ve got to look at whether a same-sex relationship is capable of something at the level of neutral self-giving that a marriage ought to exemplify. And then ask, is that what Scripture is talking about? That’s the area of dispute.
TIME: You yourself once thought it possible that same-sex relationships might be legitimate in God’s eyes.
Williams: Yes, I argued that in 1987. I still think that the points I made there and the questions I raised were worth making as part of the ongoing discussion. I’m not recanting. But those were ideas put forward as part of a theological discussion. I’m now in a position where I’m bound to say the teaching of the Church is this, the consensus is this. We have not changed our minds corporately. It’s not for me to exploit my position to push a change.
TIME: One gay activist said bitterly that he hoped you liked your newfound friends, but it strikes me that you don’t have many. Your position seems very sad and lonely.
Williams: It feels burdensome, of course. And making decisions that will lose you friends, compromise people’s perception of your integrity — that’s very hard. On the other hand, that is only a part of the reality. First and foremost, I’m a priest and a bishop, and what I have to do is to celebrate sacraments, to pray, to try to convey the reality of God. I don’t spend all my days in self-pity.
TIME: Do you see it as the taking up of a cross?
Williams: Well, of course. And anybody who expects to go through a Christian life without a cross is deluding themselves.
TIME: Last month, you signed onto a report by the Church of England citing a litany of errors in the War in Iraq. Why?
Williams: We proclaimed we were going into Iraq with the intention of creating a democracy, forgetting that democracies happen when certain conditions allow them to.
TIME: And you thought Britain was too subservient to the U.S.?
Williams: I was deeply saddened by the apparently uncritical way in which our government accepted the case for going around the U.N.
TIME: One of the things you also said was that perhaps if Blair and Bush had prayed together, they might have come to a different conclusion?
Williams:I believe good religion is good for people because it teaches you to be repentant, to believe your actions are always fallible and resting on mixed motives, that you need grace and mercy. Bad religion tries to persuade you that God is invariably and automatically on your side.
TIME: The Western world is struggling to come to terms with Islam. Where should we start?
Williams: We — Christians, Westerners, whatever — perceive the Muslim world as large, aggressive, successful, expanding. Muslims in the U.K. see themselves as small, vulnerable, under attack, suspected by everybody. When you have something like the Mohammed cartoons in the Danish papers, ask yourself what it feels like if you’re a member of an economically depressed, rather isolated Muslim community, in a majority non-Muslim environment.
TIME: When you return from study leave, you’ll focus once more on the problems within Anglicanism. Some people have already decided to stay away from the Lambeth Conference and possibly begin a process of division.
Williams: I don’t particularly want to be — I wouldn’t say blackmailed but pressured by either extreme on this. I think they’d lose by not coming. I think they need to talk to each other and listen to each other without prejudice.
TIME: Are you optimistic?
Williams: I’m hopeful. Not optimistic.
TIME: ‘Hopeful’ is a safer word?
Williams: It’s a safer word.