It is difficult to imagine such a large committee coming to a very sensible decision, particularly when those assembled under the chairmanship of Lord Luce will have been chosen with an almost painful inclusiveness: High Church bishop matching Low Church bishop, a woman priest matching an evangelical layman and so forth.
Nevertheless, they must come to a decision, knowing that whoever they choose must make decisions that risk pulling the whole Church apart.
Rowan Williams is handing on to his successor something like a vase with an irreparable crack. One false move over the question of gay marriage, gay priests or women bishops and the handsome old antique will fall apart in his successor’s hands.
The Church of England has always contained people of widely differing views. When Rowan took office in 2003, it was already beginning to lack the blessed English capacity for double-think that allowed the Church to flourish.
Now it has lost that capacity altogether.
Did the C of E condone the full expression of homosexual love? In public, no; but as everyone knew, many of the most pious bishops, priests and lay people in the Church were openly gay.
Other nations call this habit of being able to think one thing while doing another hypocrisy.
But the English have always been very good at it.
The trouble came when the Church gained a Parliament of its own – the General Synod.
The various factions huddled into groups like political parties and began to ask direct questions.
Do you approve of women priests or don’t you?
Is it all right for a bishop to sleep with his boyfriend or not?
The old church was run on nods and winks, but once the questions were in the open, fissure and schism became an inevitability.
The new Archbishop, whoever he is, cannot put off the question of whether women will become bishops as they are in the sister churches of America, Australia and elsewhere. If that happens, the dream of High Church Anglicans that we might reunite with Rome and the Orthodox is destroyed.
Fudging the gay issue will be easier.
The best policy – of scarcely talking about it – would probably be better than allowing the bigoted queer-bashers and the gay activists to fight so openly.
But what can any Archbishop do about such divisions?
Just as the Prime Minister is simultaneously the Head of the Government and the leader of a political party, the Archbishop of Canterbury is the nation’s senior religious figure and the senior bishop in the quarrelsome, peculiar Church of England.
He is also a quasi-papal figure to the Anglican Communion, generously estimated at 70 million people and containing as diverse elements as the vast Church in Nigeria – for the most part extremely conservative in outlook – and the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, which significantly never was a colonial church, but a post-1776 body independent of the C of E.
An opinion poll last week gave Dr Williams high marks, crediting him with providing public life with a clear, thoughtful voice at a time of violent assaults on the very idea of theism from such figures as Richard Daw-kins.
We need someone in public office to redress the balance, and Rowan is that gentle philosopher-king.
Religion still has urgent, serious things to say. This is what he does so well.
But not everyone gives equally high marks for his custodianship of the Church itself. When he took office, the liberals – especially the liberal gays – looked to him with hope.
There was dismay when he seemed to change sides almost overnight, aligning himself with those who did not want the openly gay Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading.
Once you start worrying who should be the next Bishop of Reading, you have left behind the world of people straining to hear the voice of God.
Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, depicted the Church of England, or Lilliput, as rancorously divided between those who opened their boiled eggs at the Big or Little End.
The C of E’s fervent warfare continues unabated.
An important fact to remember is that Rowan is only in the most tangential sense a member of the C of E. Raised a Welsh non-conformist, he flirted with the idea of becoming a Roman Catholic monk, and taught at a High Church monastery seminary before becoming a young professor at Oxford. He then became a bishop in the Church of Wales.
The C of E, with its faultlines and toxic addiction to hate-fuelled civil war, was quite alien to him. I do not believe to this day that he understands it.
While the rest of the world listens to Rowan on the big questions, his own Church wanted to hear his views on the trivial questions so dear to their heart. There must be some liturgical or theological equivalent of the words ‘F*** off’ – perhaps ‘Get Thee behind me, Satan’ – which should have been said to all who yearned for or opposed gay bishops or women priests.
A more princely figure than Rowan would have kept everyone guessing what he thought.
And if the bigots went off to form new Little-End Churches, or Big-End Churches, so be it.
He lacked the chutzpah to do that.
Will his successor make a better fist of running the C of E? Maybe.
If I had the casting vote (fellow Anglicans will be delighted to know that I don’t), I should be torn between the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, and the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones.
Chartres would have the gift of rising above these Lilliputian disputes and would conduct a Royal funeral beautifully.
Jones of Liverpool is an evangelical who now accepts that homosexuals have souls, so he might build a few bridges there.
When my mother died nine years ago, I realised that I wanted to remain a part of her Church. Coming back to churchgoing after 20 years was a shock.
The Church seemed nastier than I remembered: more quarrelsome, and beleaguered.
I’d still rather be in than out, though I find that most of my affection for the ‘dear old C of E’ is an affection for its past. Many of its current antics repel and baffle me in equal measure.
Will the committee’s decision alter anyone’s religious viewpoint?
Possibly.
Knowing a clever, holy man was at the helm while Rowan was there checked my feeling – which every debate in the Synod now reawakens – that organised religion these days is for chumps.
Probably, the muddled Church will limp on, bothering its head with nonsense. More people than ever will ignore it.
And meanwhile, in a Cambridge college, one of the nicest, cleverest men ever to be Archbishop of Canterbury will be happily poring over his books.