Dr. Williams grew up in Wales during the 1950s where "you still couldn't quite avoid the sense that Catholics were exotic and a bit frightening."

He attended an Anglican parish church in his early teens, and "a new world of Christian imagination opened. It was a moderately Anglo-Catholic church where the liturgy was celebrated with unfussy dignity and care."

Williams continued, "But the real blessing was a parish priest of extraordinary gifts - a man with a profound and informed enthusiasm for theology, poetry and drama, whose sermons I still recall as models of what preaching should be, and whose pastoral generosity was limitless."

Williams' interest in the roots of Catholic spirituality stirred during his mid-teens. A visit by Franciscans "was perhaps the first time I thought about the religious life, and whether my exploration of vocation ought to take stock of this."

He attended Cambridge University where he wrestled with questions. "Was there a clear call to the religious life, and if so did that entail becoming a Roman Catholic?"

"Looking back now, what comes most clearly into focus is that the Roman Catholics with whom I discussed this never exerted the least pressure. I think of them as setting out to help me be a better Christian rather than to secure a convert," writes Williams.

Fr Joseph Warrilow became Williams' spiritual director for many years "up to and beyond my ordination in the Church of England, and my debt to him is beyond calculation."

"The Anglican I am today is who he is because of those uncomfortable years of exploration and because of the sensitivity of the Catholic guides who so generously accompanied, encouraged, warned and inspired," Williams finished.

Sources

Catholic Herald

"Those who know little and care even less about the institutions and hierarchies of the church these days" nevertheless are attracted and challenged by Christians whose lives show they have been transformed by their encounter with Christ, said the leader of the Anglican Communion.

Pope Benedict invited Archbishop Williams to deliver a major address at the synod on the new evangelization on Wednesday.

Archbishop Williams recalled the Second Vatican Council, which, he said, was a sign that "the church was strong enough to ask itself some demanding questions."

He told CNS and Vatican Radio that the Second Vatican Council was "enormously important" for other Christians as well as for Catholics.

"I was a teenager as the council began, and a practicing Anglican, and what had been a very self-contained, rather remote, exotic, fascinating, but strange body, suddenly opened up," he said.

In many ways, he said, the synod on new evangelization is a continuation of the work of Vatican II.

"With our minds made still and ready to receive, with our self-generated fantasies about God and ourselves reduced to silence, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow," he said.

"The face we need to show to our world is the face of a humanity in endless growth toward love, a humanity so delighted and engaged by the glory of what we look toward that we are prepared to embark on a journey without end to find our way more deeply into it," Archbishop Williams told the synod.

During an interview earlier with Catholic News Service and Vatican Radio, the archbishop said: "If evangelization is just rallying the troops or just trying to get people to sign up, something's missing — what's missing is the transformed humanity that the Gospel brings us."

Archbishop Williams, who has announced he will retire at the end of December, also had a private meeting with Pope Benedict.

Sources

• Catholic News Service
• Virtue Online
• Image: Clerical Whispers

Hinting at the pressures of the job, he said he hoped his successor would have 'the constitution of an ox and the skin of a rhinoceros'.

Before he steps down the Archbishop of Canterbury will visit Christchurch in November to offer his support to the quake-ravaged city. This visit will be his final international duty.

Archbishop David Moxon, Archbishop and Primate at Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, speaking on behalf of Archbishops Brown Turei and Winston Halapua has paid tribute to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

"He was greatly respected by us," he said, "as a deeply prayerful, thoughtful person, as someone of huge intelligence.

"But he was above all wise, in the Biblical sense, with a great heart for the diversity of the Anglican Communion, across all its cultures, and with all its theological tensions.

"We will miss Archbishop Rowan's grace and mind very much, and we wish him well."

Source

• Anglicantaonga
• The Press
• The Daily Mail
• Image: The Guardian

Benedict welcomed some 300 leaders representing a rainbow of faiths to the hilltop Italian town of Assisi to commemorate the 25th anniversary of a daylong prayer for peace here called by Pope John Paul II in 1986 amid Cold War conflicts.

The German-born Benedict noted that in the 25 years since John Paul's peace day, the Berlin Wall had crumbled without bloodshed. But he said nations are still full of discord and that religion is now frequently being used to justify violence.

But the pope said it was wrong to demand that faith disappear from daily life to somehow rid the world of a religious pretext for violence. He argued that the absence of God from people's daily lives was even more dangerous, since it deprived men and women of any moral criteria to judge their actions.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion and one of the first speakers at the peace meeting, said the delegates weren't gathered there to come to a "minimum common ground of belief."

Rather, he said, the meeting would show the world that through their distinctiveness, different faiths provide the wisdom to draw upon "in the struggle against the foolishness of a world still obsessed with fear and suspicion, still in love with the idea of a security based on active hostility, and still capable of tolerating or ignoring massive loss of life among the poorest through war and disease."

And there was a lot of distinctiveness on hand. Standing on the altar of St. Mary of the Angels basilica, Wande Abimbola of Nigeria, representing Africa's traditional Yoruba religion, sang and shook a percussion instrument as he told the delegates that peace can only come with greater respect for indigenous religions.

Thursday's meeting also included Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I and representatives from Greek, Russian, Serbian and Belarusian Orthodox churches as well as Lutheran, Methodist and Baptist leaders. Several rabbis were joined by some 60 Muslims, a half-dozen Hindus and Shinto believers, three Taoists, three Jains and a Zoroastrian.

Full Article: Fox News