[London Evening Standard by Richard Godwin] As the Archbishop of Canterbury bids farewell to his time in office, he tells Richard Godwin he will miss London and as for his successor, they will need ‘the hide of a rhino’, he says
Even before the latest outrage over gay marriage, Dr Rowan Williams, 61, could contemplate stepping down as Archbishop of Canterbury with something like relief. His 10 patient years in the role have often seemed like a trial. When he announced, in March, that he would be returning to academia, with “the sense that there are some conflicts that won’t go away, however long you struggle with them”, he warned that his successor would need “the hide of a rhino”.
For the conservatives in the Church, Williams has always seemed dangerously liberal; for the liberals, he has often proved dismayingly conservative. For many outside the Church, his institution is an irrelevance anyway, with the gay marriage row underlining precisely why Church and state should be uncoupled. All this, in a 24-hour media age, where most of us are bored by non-downloadable forms of spirituality.
The full article from the London Evening Standard can be found here