Anglican Leader to Step Down

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury who has overseen a turbulent decade as spiritual leader of about 80 million followers of the Anglican faith, said he would step down at the end of the year and take up a new post as master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Known for possessing a scholarly and versatile mind, as well as a gift for the common touch, Dr. Williams leaves as the institution faces divisive debates over homosexuality and gender.

For the past decade, Dr. Williams has tried to blend progressive views with Anglican theology and thus adapt the church's doctrine to modern society. For example, the Church of England is nearing a final vote about allowing women to become bishops; Dr. Williams has tried to balance the demands of those who support the idea with those who don't.

In a statement on his web site, Dr. Williams, 61 years old, said it has been an "immense privilege to serve as Archbishop of Canterbury over the past decade, and moving on has not been an easy decision." He didn't explicitly say in his statement why he planned to resign.

In an interview with the British news agency Press Association, however, he nodded to the difficult choices on the horizon. The looming final vote on female bishops was one of the "watersheds" this year that persuaded him to consider moving on, Dr. Williams said in the interview.

"I think that it is a job of immense demands and I would hope that my successor has the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros," Dr. Williams said.


Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams

It hasn't been an easy decade. Dr. Williams has written in sympathetic terms about gay relationships and thus drawn disapproval from conservative members of the church. Meanwhile, the liberal wing has expressed frustration that the Archbishop's socially liberal stance hasn't engendered enough real change in the church.

"He's been attempting to hold both theological liberals and conservatives together, and that has meant that he's suppressed his own views," said Paul Handley, managing editor of Church Times, a leading Anglican weekly newspaper in the U.K. "As a result, he's been battered by both sides."

Dr. Williams is in the midst of a key battle right now. He has backed a deal, known as the Anglican Covenant, that would effectively prevent openly homosexual clergy from becoming bishops—a pact aimed at preventing the church from splitting.

The document was conceived in 2003 after Gene Robinson was elected the first openly gay Anglican bishop by the U.S. Episcopal Church. Conservative priests—especially those in Africa—protested, and Dr. Williams set up a commission to mend the rift.

Dr. Williams unveiled the covenant in 2010 and called for it to be endorsed or risk seeing the "piece-by-piece dissolution" of the Anglican church. Branches of the church around the world are mulling whether to adopt the covenant.

Anglicanism arose from the 16th-century rift between Henry VIII and the Catholic Church, and is the world's third-largest group of Christians after the Catholics and the Orthodox. The queen of England is Supreme Governor of the Church of England and formally appoints the Archbishop of Canterbury.

But unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican church is a loose federation and the Archbishop of Canterbury has few powers to enforce unity among its 38 autonomous provinces.

The Anglican churches in richer countries, including the Episcopal Church in the U.S., the Church of England and the Anglican Church of Canada, tend to be more liberal. Their counterparts in Africa and other parts of the developing world are bigger and are often more conservative.

Dr. Williams was confirmed as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury in December 2002. He has written more than two dozen books on subjects ranging from history and poetry to economics, theology and the writing of Fyodor Dostoevsky. He is a fan of the TV show "The Simpsons."

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