Rowan Williams to step down as Anglican leader

[March 16, 2012]  LONDON (AP) -- Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is stepping down at the end of the year, he announced Friday, calling an end to a tumultuous decade as leader of a global Anglican Communion sharply divided on issues of sexuality and gender.

Williams, 61, will take up a new post as master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

He was appointed in 2002 as archbishop of Canterbury, the senior official in the Church of England and spiritual leader of the global Anglican Communion.

"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," Williams said.

"I am abidingly grateful to all those friends and colleagues who have so generously supported Jane (Williams' wife) and myself in these years, and all the many diverse parishes and communities in the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion that have brought vision, hope and excitement to my own ministry," he added.

Much of Williams' time as archbishop was devoted to efforts to hold the diverse churches within the Anglican Communion together despite an often bitter dispute over homosexuality which put conservative and growing African churches at odds with liberal churches in the United States and Canada.

Within England, Williams disappointed his liberal supporters by not backing the appointment of a gay priest, Jeffrey John, to a bishopric. Yet conservatives remained suspicious of Williams because, as archbishop of Wales, he had knowingly ordained gay men to the priesthood.

As the Church of England moves slowly toward allowing women to become bishops, Williams had sought with limited success to devise a formula to placate both advocates of female bishops, and those in the church who refuse to have anything to do with such an appointment.

Williams also caused a political storm in 2008 by suggesting that Islamic Sharia law could have a role in Britain in settling some disputes. The ensuing frenzy in some quarters ignored the fact that Islamic principles were already used to settle some disputes.

The archbishop gained the support of Lord Phillips, then the senior judge in England, who said "there was no reason why Sharia principles, or any other religious code, should not be the basis for mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution."

[Associated Press; By ROBERT BARR]

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