Just across the Thames from the Houses of Parliament, surrounded by the brutalist tower blocks of Vauxhall, is Lambeth Palace.With its turrets, unexpected doors, red-brick Tudor towers and a flourishing 450-year-old fig tree, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s London residence looks a bit like a human-scale Hogwarts.
Inside, there are rooms filled to the ceiling with bound documents only reachable by long wooden ladders, corridors lined with the portraits of previous archbishops (many of them indistinguishable in their ruffs and wigs), and the living quarters of the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dr Rowan Williams, Primate of All England.
Every morning just before seven, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury makes his way down to the Crypt Chapel, a vaulted 13th-century wine cellar where, with candles burning and the first rays of daylight penetrating its latticed windows, the senior bishop of the 77m-strong Anglican Communion kneels before the simple altar, head bowed, for half an hour of silent prayer.
Eventually, the silence is broken as the archbishop and Sister Jean-Mary, one of two nuns living at Lambeth, read out alternate lines of the psalms. Williams’ voice is a beautifully modulated bass – so full of gravitas that even as a teenager he was cast as God (complete with false beard) in an undergraduate production. These offices finished, Williams makes his way to his office – and in-tray – upstairs
At a time of dwindling congregations and with the Church of England regularly lampooned and criticised by both believers and non-believers, I have come to visit Williams. Our first meeting takes place just before Pope Benedict announces that those dissatisfied with the liberal drift of the Church of England, particularly the consecration of women bishops, would be allowed to convert en masse to Rome.
It is a thunderbolt that provides another opportunity for the archbishop’s opponents to air their grievances. Conservative Anglicans have long argued that Williams is not muscular enough in his condemnations of sin; that he backs leftish causes such as the environment and poverty at the expense of talking about God; and that he pitches his speech at an obtuse level that is almost impenetrable to humble church-goers but leads to headlines such as, “Archbishop Calls for Sharia Law in the UK”.
Now they can complain that he should not have agreed to an ill-at-ease press conference with the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, that a more robust leader would have cancelled this weekend’s long-planned visit to Rome.
To his defenders, however, Williams is a prelate of rare warmth and humility who can connect with a public disinclined to listen to the Church. They say he is intellectually fearless: prepared to debate in public the existence of God with famous atheists such as Richard Dawkins; to write a book on Dostoevsky; to submit himself to an interrogation by Jeremy Paxman on the moral lessons of the credit crunch. Thousands of words pour out of his study each week on subjects ranging across national life – from the narrowness of the primary school curriculum to the role of the media in trivialising the complex. With regular slots on the opinion pages of newspapers (all written by himself rather than, as is common, ghosted), he sometimes seems more like intellectual-in-chief than a traditional archbishop.
On Wednesday October 7, we go to St Andrew Holborn, a church on the edge of the City rebuilt by Christopher Wren. Today the church caters to a less devout world by running a listening service for the stressed-at-work, holding lunchtime lectures and, at weekends, lending its facilities to a Russian Orthodox congregation.
The priest, the Archdeacon of Hackney Dr Lyle Dennen, is a friend and ally of Williams from their Cambridge days, with a Harvard doctorate in law, a Loyd Grossman accent, a theatrical manner and a shared taste for Anglo-Catholic ritual.
Williams has come to St Andrew’s to bless an icon painted by an Italian nun and is dressed in full episcopal rig (“I’ve got my overalls on,” he explains). A thurible releases billowing clouds of incense – an effect heightened, Dennen later confides, by the attentions of a West End lighting director who’s a member of the congregation.
As the congregation receive their communion wafers (swine flu has temporarily removed the chalice), most bow and a few adopt the old practice of kneeling to kiss the archbishop’s amethyst ring. Afterwards, in the nave over canapés and red wine, Williams is petitioned about everything from an arcane dispute to do with the Russian Orthodox Church to demands for parish visits in Ely.
The archbishop leans forward when he speaks – childhood meningitis left him deaf in one ear – and makes a point of seeking out those who are standing back. No one seems interested in speaking about women bishops or gay priests.
On the morning of Tuesday October 13 at Lambeth Palace, which – despite an ambience that is equal parts liberal NGO, senior common room and stately home – remains more a household than a workplace, Williams is chairing a meeting of the Anglican mission agencies. Many of these groups, which undertake a combination of aid work and proselytising, have dusty titles that come from a more Christian age: the Church Army, the Mothers’ Union, the Mission to Seafarers and the Church Mission Society.
But the dozen leaders gathered around the table have updated their mission of faith and good works. There are PowerPoint-style handouts and talk of “migrating to a new vision”, as some of these organisations discuss their experience of merging. Though Williams makes small jokes and encourages people, this kind of managerialism doesn’t appear to be his natural style: he seems more at home in concluding with the philosophical observation: “The sheer double-edged quality of globalisation is destructive and creative. We need to monitor the destructive and encourage the creative.”
He then calls for silence and says grace.
In the evening we head to Southwark Cathedral, where he delivers a lecture on climate change to a packed and youthful audience. The “human soul is one of the foremost casualties of environmental degradation”, says Williams: “Our sense of who and what we are” has become distorted.
Two days later, back in Lambeth Palace, he chairs a day-long inter-faith forum of about 70 young Christians and Muslims who are drafting a statement for world leaders that the archbishop will relay when he travels to the Copenhagen summit next month.
The environment is one of the causes that irritate critics who think the archbishop should be talking about more traditional sins instead. But he’s taken it seriously: replacing all of Lambeth’s incandescent light bulbs, driving a hybrid Honda Civic and, no mean feat for the leader of a worldwide church, achieving a virtually flight-free year in 2008.
The 14th-century guard room, where archbishops once stored their private armoury, fills with hijabs, kurtas and smart suits, and there is much talk about the common Green ground between the faiths. Williams is enthused as he combines a discussion of Christianity – “The wackiest idea of all is repentance”, he tells the room – with a critique of the technicalities of carbon taxes.
So how does the archbishop strike his young visitors? One tells me: “The Anglican church’s willingness to engage is better than my own church.”
A young Muslim, who has made a point of congratulating Williams for his remarks on Sharia law, says: “I look up to him because I can see how easily he mobilises his own faith. We don’t have a Muslim equivalent of the archbishop. In many ways when I look at the archbishop now I wish we did.”
But another young Muslim is more sceptical: “In an establishment sense he is one of the most important people in the country. But in a celebrity sense he is not.”
A week later we meet in his office at Lambeth Palace with its accumulated clutter and precariously balanced piles of theology books stacked on the sideboards. The day’s newspapers are full of talk of Williams’ humiliation at the hands of the Pope. The archbishop looks tired and accepts his press secretary’s offer of some water. “I’ve a bit of a sore throat,” he says, “and a sore ego.”
“I did have very short notice [about Pope Benedict’s announcement]. I think that was a pity,” says Williams in a half-whisper. “It would have been good to discuss it a bit more. But I don’t think it’s a deadly blow, by any means. There are people who we knew were very likely to become Roman Catholics if the Church moved ahead with ordaining women as bishops here. These people would have gone anyway.
“There are people in the Church of England who are opposed to the ordination of women, particularly women bishops, who would not see it as automatically the right thing to do to become a Roman Catholic. So it’s not going to be the sword to cut the Gordian knot.”
Could the Pope’s initiative even be a blessing in disguise for the Church, I suggest, clearing out the traditionalists who have been fuelling disunity. Williams is quick to dismiss this: “I don’t think it will solve our problems in that sense – precisely because when people aren’t Roman Catholics they usually aren’t Roman Catholics for a reason. The fact that the Pope says, ‘We can make it easier for you,’ [it] doesn’t necessarily follow that they will go.”
One of Williams’ most abiding characteristics has been a refusal to use his pulpit to condemn the personal morality of an increasingly secular public. He has said he is keen to avoid the “comic-vicar-to-the-nation” role. Nor is he interested in the stratagems of political leadership – forcing a “Clause Four moment” by taking on the traditional wing of his own Church.
He is aware, however, that this could lead to his being seen as weak: “People think vicars are silly, ineffectual figures who bumble around the edges of situation comedies. We have a dangerous blurring of the leader and the celebrity in our global culture – people don’t always think leadership is being exercised unless noise is being made. And I think they’re wrong. I just live with the perception [of weakness] because it is the kind of culture we live in.”
On the previous Friday, Williams had been present at the opening of the new British Supreme Court, alongside the Queen, the former poet laureate Andrew Motion and the main political leaders. It was one of those high British occasions involving a fair amount of fancy dress. Jack Straw, the justice secretary, wore a white ruff, black tights and a pair of pantomime slippers and the archbishop was in full vestments.
After speeches from Gordon Brown and poetry from Motion, Williams stepped forward to offer prayers for wisdom for those responsible for “your servant Elizabeth the Queen and Governor” that she may always “incline towards God’s will”.
I ask him now whether he feels that the Archbishop of Canterbury is still part of national life in a way that he once was.
“It was a surprise coming into this office that the archbishop has, almost as a right, a position in preaching at the big national events – the Iraq service, the commemoration of 7/7, the passing of the first world war generation. There’s an absolute take-for-granted element that you are there – and what you say, I think, is listened to.”
And do the politicians listen? “Robert Runcie [the 102nd Archbishop] was a bit pessimistic about this in his own day. He thought that you couldn’t guarantee that an archbishop would be able to talk to the Cabinet about particular issues in the foreseeable future. That hasn’t happened: conversations still go on over the river,” he said gesturing towards Parliament. “And there isn’t a problem of access – not at all.
“The Church is still somewhere people put emotions that won’t go anywhere else. At moments of transition or moments of crisis, it is extraordinary how many people will use the church.
“One thing most clergy have experienced is singing solos in crematoriums because nobody wants to sing hymns – we’ve all been there. Somebody will say, ‘Can we have “Morning has Broken?”’ but nobody wants to sing it so the priest gets up and does a rather embarrassed solo. Should we mind? A lot of me simply says, ‘What if it’s a bit humiliating to be used? So what?’ It’s a gift to be given.
“It’s very helpful from time to time to remember that the established church is slightly absurd. When I was quite a young priest I was taking part in a wedding in a cathedral – very solemn, and I dressed up very splendidly. We were processing and I turned a corner and there were a group of tourists gawping. And I thought, ‘Goodness me, we must look peculiar.’ It doesn’t mean you don’t do it. But it does, perhaps, mean that you are protected from being too pleased with yourself. You must remember, ‘Well, this is a bit odd.’”
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