It is, Rowan Williams assures me, a coincidence that his new book will be published three days after the installation of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury. “I will not be attending,” he says. “You don’t want to be Marley’s ghost.”
Yet, fittingly – since that book takes solidarity as its theme – this priest, poet and critic is keen to empathise with Mullally, the first female Archbishop, in the weight of challenges she faces. “Every archbishop starts, like every president or prime minister: with expectations being thrown at them,” he recalls of his time at Lambeth Palace from 2002 to 2012. “Realising you’re not going to be able to meet them is part of the job. It is no walk in the park.”
Williams, who now lives in Cardiff with his theologian wife Jane, comes across as gentler, kinder and more self-deprecating than I remember him from his episcopal tenure. He used to make regular headlines, his every utterance and act picked apart. His 2011 dismissal of David Cameron’s “Big Society” initiative as “painfully stale” had the Conservative benches in uproar. Today, as we sit talking in a book-lined reception room at his publisher’s London office, he stands out from the colourful backdrop in his black clerical shirt and trousers, with a simple cross hanging round his neck. Those monkish eyebrows remain as untamed as ever.
The two biggest issues in Mullally’s in-tray, Williams tells me, are the same ones he tried but failed to settle during his turbulent decade in post: women’s ordination and what he refers to as “the same-sex question”. With the first, he feels, at least in England, “some of the bitterness has gone out of it”. Not, though, in much of the 85-million-strong worldwide Anglican Communion, over which the Archbishop of Canterbury also presides, with some provinces muttering about schism. “I honestly don’t know whether the Communion will survive,” he says bluntly.