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.
Closer to home, in 2023 the Church of England bishops – Mullally included – agreed to a trial of same-sex blessing services.
But conservative Anglicans loudly objected that such a move would be akin to allowing same-sex marriage, when Church teaching states that marriage is only for a man and a woman.
Late last year, after three years of wrangling over how the new services would work, the bishops – Mullally included – performed a very public U-turn.
Was that the wrong decision? “The job of the archbishop is to bring people together,” Williams says quietly and carefully.
For one of such famously formidable intelligence – he was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge for seven years after leaving Lambeth – he sounds like a politician side-stepping a question.
The same reluctance appears when Williams talks (eloquently) about our shared human dignity.
I can’t help reminding him that Mullally is replacing Justin Welby, who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury to be forced to resign, when a safeguarding report showed he had failed to listen to child victims of abuse by his friend, the Anglican lay reader John Smyth.
“It is a terrible Christian failure,” Williams acknowledges, grimacing. He considers it an example of how that belief in human dignity is something that the Church “has singularly failed to communicate, and not only failed to communicate but actively modelled the opposite, in the past and now”.
Is there anything in his own tenure as archbishop on which he now looks back with regret? “There was so much, day by day, [where] I thought I was not getting this right.” Such as? “My handling of the nomination of Jeffrey John, which had to be cancelled. I still lose sleep over that.”
In 2003, Williams – who had, prior to arriving at Lambeth Palace, taken a liberal view towards same-sex clergy – appeared set to confirm the nomination as Bishop of Reading of John, a priest in a same-sex relationship.
But he retreated under pressure from more conservative Anglicans.
It is claimed he put pressure on John to drop out of the appointment process. He clearly doesn’t want to go back over that ground in detail.
More generally, it has often been said – and with Mullally’s appointment, it’s being said again – how overwhelming and nigh-impossible the job of Archbishop of Canterbury can be.
“I don’t think there were moments when I ever thought, ‘This isn’t worthwhile’,” Williams says.
But, he admits, “there were moments when I certainly thought, ‘I can’t do this.’ And even more moments when I thought, ‘I really don’t want to do this.’”
Perhaps nurturing greater solidarity among Anglicans could just give the new Archbishop a sporting chance of pulling it off. Williams’s new book on the subject is based on a series of academic lectures delivered over more than 10 years, and ranges widely through history and around the globe.
In a nutshell, Williams argues that solidarity can take many forms, from interdependence and mutual respect to serving the needs of the poor. It was evident, he believes, in Polish shipyard workers in the 1980s rising up against communism under the banner of Solidarność, but also in those who don a Palestinian keffiyeh today to stand up for those dying in Gaza.
Among his reasons for wanting to kindle a conversation about solidarity’s benefits – besides a wish that Anglicanism be less fractious – is his broader perception that, right now, “people are running for the corners of the room. The implication of something like an America First policy is, we will benefit if you don’t. And so you rule out from the start the idea that it might be that you can only benefit together.”
Such fragmentation – in a society, between nations, within churches – seems to him a pernicious trend.
“There is a way of approaching a conflict, or even rivalry, with at least the possibility left open that we might find something that is the common good… [that] you are only secure when your neighbour is secure.”
But why, I wonder, is society so fragmented?
“The pace of social change, the environmental crisis, a sense of a loss of control on lots of people’s parts – of decisions being made elsewhere. And particularly that sense of powerlessness – ‘I do not know where the levers are that will give me some control.’”
He appears, I suggest, to be talking about a Left-leaning concept of solidarity, and setting it against a more individualist approach on the Right.
“I don’t think solidarity is a partisan thing at all,” he comes back strongly. “It’s about a fundamental belief around what constitutes our humanity.”
Talk of humanity brings us to human rights, and the issue of immigration. There’s political momentum behind the idea of loosening, or even breaking, ties with the European Court of Human Rights.
Williams becomes more passionate here.
“There is a way of coming round to understand human rights as something other than just a ready-made goodie-bag of individual entitlements. It seems very easy, as it has happened in history, to say [to someone else], ‘For this reason or that, you don’t really count.’”
For all his energy, however, his view is far from rose-tinted.
On the Church of England, which many unhappy members fear is in terminal decline, he sounds almost resigned.
“I keep going to mass in my parish church in Cardiff, and making the most of that. What reassures me, what anchors me, is ultimately an act of faith, of theological conviction, that if God wants the Church to exist, the Church will exist.”
Reform has recently pledged to ban the conversion of Christian churches into mosques. Might that sort of action help to sustain the Church?
He sighs audibly.
“It is often deployed as a very good way of consolidating the ‘enemy syndrome’. ‘Let’s be quite clear we are Christians, and we are not whatever else, especially Muslims.’ And that’s where I get a bit suspicious. Using Christianity just as a cultural marker, a line in the sand, looking out at your enemy, saying ‘This is where we are’.”
Is he saying that British public life has lost its moral centre?
“Yes,” he replies, boldly and without any caveat. “Increasingly, we permit and collude with dishonourable forms of behaviour, and we don’t seem very concerned about that.”
I press him to be more specific.
“I’m thinking of truth-telling in public life, and even more so when I look across the Atlantic – the venting, coarsening of the whole fabric of public office, with no sense that to hold public office requires a certain level of maintaining public dignity.”
I think we all know who he is referring to. Can he give me a name? “Satan,” he replies, with a laugh.