Rowan Williams
Rowan Douglas Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is a Welsh Anglican bishop, theologian and poet, who served as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. Previously the Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales, Williams was the first Archbishop of Canterbury in modern times not to be appointed from within the Church of England.
Williams's primacy was marked by speculation that the Anglican Communion was fragmenting over disagreements on contemporary issues such as homosexuality and the ordination of women. Williams worked to keep all sides in dialogue. Notable events during his time as Archbishop of Canterbury include the rejection by a majority of dioceses of his proposed Anglican Covenant and, in the final general synod of his tenure, his unsuccessful attempt to secure a sufficient majority for a measure to allow the appointment of women as bishops in the Church of England.
Having spent much of his earlier career as an academic at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford successively, Williams speaks three languages and reads at least nine.
Williams retired as Archbishop of Canterbury on 31 December 2012 and was succeeded by Justin Welby. On 26 December 2012, 10 Downing Street had announced Williams's elevation to the peerage as a life peer, so that he could continue to speak in the House of Lords. Following the creation of his title on 8 January and its gazetting on 11 January 2013, he was introduced to the temporal benches of the House of Lords as Baron Williams of Oystermouth on 15 January 2013, sitting as a crossbencher. Oystermouth is a district of Swansea.
Williams delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013 and served as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, between 2013 and 2020. He took up the position of chancellor of the University of South Wales in 2014. He retired from the House of Lords on 31 August 2020 and from Magdalene College that autumn, returning to Abergavenny in his former Diocese of Monmouth.
Early life and ordination
Williams was born on 14 June 1950 in Swansea, Wales, into a Welsh-speaking family. He was the only child of Nancy Delphine and Aneurin Williams – Presbyterians who became Anglicans in 1961. He was educated at the state sector Dynevor School, Swansea, before reading theology at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with starred first-class honours. He then went to Wadham College, Oxford, where he studied under A. M. Allchin and graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1975 with a thesis entitled "The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique".Williams lectured and trained for ordination at the College of the Resurrection in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, for two years. In 1977, he returned to Cambridge to teach theology as a tutor at Westcott House; he was made a deacon in the chapel by Eric Wall, Bishop of Huntingdon, at Michaelmas. While there, he was ordained a priest the Petertide following, by Peter Walker, Bishop of Ely, at Ely Cathedral.
Personal life
On 4 July 1981, Williams married Jane Paul, a writer and lecturer in theology. They have two children.Career
Early academic career and pastoral ministry
Williams did not have a formal curacy until 1980, when he served at St George's, Chesterton, Cambridge, until 1983, after having been appointed a university lecturer in divinity at Cambridge. In 1984 he became dean and chaplain of Clare College and, in 1986 at the age of 36, he was appointed to the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford, a position which brought with it appointment to a residentiary canonry of Christ Church Cathedral. In 1989 he received the degree of Doctor of Divinity and, in 1990, was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.Episcopal ministry
On 5 December 1991, Williams was elected Bishop of Monmouth in the Church in Wales: he was consecrated a bishop on 1 May 1992 at St Asaph Cathedral and enthroned at Newport Cathedral on 14 May. He continued to serve as Bishop of Monmouth after he was elected to also be the Archbishop of Wales in December 1999, in which capacity he was enthroned again at Newport Cathedral on 26 February 2000.In 2002, he was announced as the successor to George Carey as Archbishop of Canterbury — the senior bishop in the Church of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury in England acts as a focus of unity recognised as primus inter pares but does not exercise authority in Anglican provinces outside the Church of England. As a bishop of the disestablished Church in Wales, Williams was the first Archbishop of Canterbury since the English Reformation to be appointed to this office from outside the Church of England. His election by the chapter of Canterbury Cathedral was confirmed by nine bishops in the customary ceremony in London on 2 December 2002, when he officially became Archbishop of Canterbury. He was enthroned at Canterbury Cathedral on 27 February 2003 as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury.
The translation of Williams to Canterbury was widely canvassed. As a bishop he had demonstrated a wide range of interests in social and political matters and was widely regarded, by academics and others, as a figure who could make Christianity credible to the intelligent unbeliever. As a patron of Affirming Catholicism, his appointment was a considerable departure from that of his predecessor and his views, such as those expressed in a widely published lecture on homosexuality were seized on by a number of evangelical and conservative Anglicans. The debate had begun to divide the Anglican Communion, however, and Williams, in his new role as its leader was to have an important role.
As Archbishop of Canterbury, Williams acted ex officio as visitor of King's College London, the University of Kent and Keble College, Oxford, governor of Charterhouse School, and, since 2005, as chancellor of Canterbury Christ Church University. In addition to these ex officio roles, Cambridge University awarded him an honorary doctorate in divinity in 2006; in April 2007, Trinity College and Wycliffe College, both associated with the University of Toronto, awarded him a joint Doctor of Divinity degree during his first visit to Canada since being enthroned and he also received honorary degrees and fellowships from various universities including Kent, Oxford, and Roehampton.
Williams speaks or reads eleven languages: English, Welsh, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Biblical Hebrew, Syriac, Latin, and both Ancient and Modern Greek. He learnt Russian in order to be able to read the works of Dostoevsky in the original. He has since described his spoken German as a "disaster area" and said that he is "a very clumsy reader and writer of Russian". He also stated that he knows some Italian, which means he knows twelve languages.
Williams is also a poet and translator of poetry. His collection The Poems of Rowan Williams, published by Perpetua Press, was longlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award in 2004. Besides his own poems, which have a strong spiritual and landscape flavour, the collection contains several fluent translations from Welsh poets. He was criticised in the press for allegedly supporting a "pagan organisation", the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards, which promotes Welsh language and literature and uses druidic ceremonial but is actually not religious in nature.
In 2005, Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles, a divorcee, in a civil ceremony. Afterwards, Williams gave the couple a formal service of blessing. In fact, the arrangements for the wedding and service were strongly supported by the Archbishop "consistent with the Church of England guidelines concerning remarriage". The "strongly-worded" act of penitence by the couple, a confessional prayer written by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, to King Henry VIII, was interpreted as a confession by the bride and groom of past sins, albeit without specific reference and going "some way towards acknowledging concerns" over their past misdemeanours.
Williams officiated at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton on 29 April 2011.
On 16 November 2011, Williams attended a special service at Westminster Abbey celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible in the presence of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Prince Charles, Patron of the King James Bible Trust.
To mark the ending of his tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury, Williams presented a BBC television documentary about Canterbury Cathedral, in which he reflected upon his time in office. Entitled Goodbye to Canterbury, the programme was screened on 1 January 2013.
2010 General Synod address
On 9 February 2010, in an address to the General Synod of the Church of England, Williams warned that damaging infighting over the ordination of women as bishops and gay priests could lead to a permanent split in the Anglican Communion. He stressed that he did not "want nor relish" the prospect of division and called on the Church of England and Anglicans worldwide to step back from a "betrayal" of God's mission and to put the work of Christ before schism. But he conceded that, unless Anglicans could find a way to live with their differences over women as bishops and homosexual ordination, the church would change shape and become a multi-tier communion of different levels – a schism in all but name.Williams also said that "it may be that the covenant creates a situation in which there are different levels of relationship between those claiming the name of Anglican. I don’t at all want or relish this, but suspect that, without a major change of heart all round, it may be an unavoidable aspect of limiting the damage we are already doing to ourselves." In such a structure, some churches would be given full membership of the Anglican Communion, while others had a lower-level form of membership, with no more than observer status on some issues. Williams also used his keynote address to issue a profound apology for the way that he had spoken about "exemplary and sacrificial" gay Anglican priests in the past. "There are ways of speaking about the question that seem to ignore these human realities or to undervalue them," he said. "I have been criticised for doing just this, and I am profoundly sorry for the carelessness that could give such an impression."