As the Anglican Church battles towards a seemingly inevitable schism, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has decided to “get away from it all” for three months in the summer.

Dr Williams, an Oxford scholar at heart who since moving to Canterbury has made it his mission to try to retain unity in a Church split over its doctrine on sexuality, is to go back to his books for two months.

Apart from doing the annual Petertide ordinations at Canterbury Cathedral, he will spend June and July on study leave. He will read books, possibly write another one, and spend some time outside Britain.

Then, in August, he will take a holiday, and will not return to his desk at Lambeth Palace until September.

Some parishes in the Church of England will be saying special prayers for the Archbishop next week on Good Friday, the day when the churches commemorate the Crucifixion of Christ. The consensus among many is that Dr Williams deserves three months off if he is to regain his strength for the great battle ahead.

But taking his Easter liturgical duties into account, the three-month break leaves him little time in which to accept the request of bishops in the Episcopal Church of the US to fly over for a summit on gays.

The American Church has been given until September 30 by the Anglican primates to step back from its progress towards same-sex blessings and gay ordinations and to approve a scheme of oversight for orthodox Anglicans in the US.

At their recent meeting, US bishops rejected the demand for an oversight scheme and instead asked Dr Williams and other members of the primates’ standing committee to fly over and meet them, offering to pay their travelling expenses.

Highly placed Episcopalians are wondering how he can find the time to take three months off while not accepting their invitation. Lambeth Palace said that the invitation was still “under consideration”.

The Archbishop’s three months of rest, prayer and study are expected to help him to confont the decision of who to invite to the next Lambeth Conference in July 2008.

The ten-yearly meeting of all the Church’s 800-plus bishops is due to take place at the University of Kent, at Canterbury. Conservatives from African provinces are likely to boycott the meeting if the Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, who is gay, is invited along with those bishops who assisted in his consecration in 2003.

If he is not invited, protests from the liberals who dominate the US Episcopal Church will be equally strong. Some sources have suggested that Dr Williams might yet take the “nuclear option” not to hold the conference at all.