Archbishop of Canterbury to Step Down at End of Year
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL
LONDON — After a decade of struggling inconclusively to keep the worldwide Anglican Communion from breaking apart over intractable issues like women clergy, gay bishops and same-sex marriage, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, announced Friday that he would step down at the end of the year to take up a senior position at
The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, on Friday. He is to take a senior position at Cambridge University.
The resignation of the 61-year-old prelate had been widely predicted, although its timing surprised some of his followers. Experts have been busy for months speculating over Archbishop Williams’s likely successor as the senior bishop of the Church of England and as the symbolic head of the Anglican Communion, the international network of Anglican and Episcopal churches that represents nearly 80 million people.
Archbishop Williams is to become the master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, next January, returning to the academic life — much of it at Oxford and Cambridge — that he left on his first appointment as a bishop more than 20 years ago. In effect, he will be returning to what he always said was his primary calling as a liberal theologian, leaving behind the tangled church politics that require the archbishop of Canterbury to have, as he said Friday, “the hide of a rhinoceros and the constitution of an ox.”
Here’s the rest of the story——http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/world/europe/archbishop-of-canterbury-rowan-williams-to-resign-at-end-of-year.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22_20120317
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