THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, believes that the Church of England should change its mind on homosexuality in the same way that it has already altered its teaching on slavery, hellfire, usury and marriage after divorce.

According to a new biography of Dr Williams serialised in The Times today, Dr Williams believes that faithful gay partnerships should be accepted by all Christians who endorse contraception.

After Dr Williams’ translation to Canterbury was announced last summer, he wrote to his fellow primates in the Anglican Church worldwide, promising to abide by the 1998 Lambeth Conference resolution upholding traditional biblical norms on the issue.

But according to the book, Rowan Williams: An Introduction, by Rupert Shortt, a former pupil of Dr Williams’ at Oxford and currently the Religion Editor of The Times Literary Supplement, the Archbishop’s private view remains at variance with this.

Mr Shortt, who had five face-to-face sessions with Dr Williams and three telephone interviews, and who allowed him copy approval of the text, writes: “His private view remains that an adjustment of teaching on sexuality would not be different from the kind of flexibility now being shown to divorcees who wish to remarry, or the softening in the 16th century of the Church’s once total opposition to borrowing with interest, or the 19th and 20th-century shifts of view on subjects like slavery and eternal hellfire.”

The book comes as the worldwide Anglican Church has once again been debating how to avert schism over the issue.

At a meeting in Gramado in southern Brazil this week of the 38 Anglican primates, Dr Williams and his fellow archbishops debated a report, True Union in the Body, which spoke of “anarchy and division” if liberal bishops were to permit the formalising of homosexual relationships through an official ceremony of “marriage” or blessing. The report, commissioned by the Archbishop of the West Indies, the Most Rev Drexel Gomez, argued that bishops who defy the Church’s policy should be “openly rebuked” and no longer recognised as Anglican.

The meeting, which ended on Sunday was in private but Dr Williams is understood to have spoken in support of the report. However, fears that he represents a liberalising trend in the Church were accentuated last week by the appointment to the episcopate of one of the Church of England’s most prominent advocates of homosexual rights, who has called for the ordination of practising homosexuals and blessings of gay marriages.

Canon Jeffrey John, the Chancellor and Canon Theologian of Southwark Cathedral, was last week named by Downing Street as the new Suffragan Bishop of Reading. His appointment, made by the Bishop of Oxford, the Right Rev Richard Harries, is expected both to give fresh impetus to the Church’s gay rights movement and to add to the concern among traditionalists and evangelicals over the Church’s increasingly liberal stance on the issue. Dr John, 50, has been an outspoken campaigner for gay rights for decades and last year contributed to a collection of prayers for homosexuals. It included prayers for same-sex marriages, sex changes and “fantasy and fetish”. At present the Church of England’s policy is set out in a document from the House of Bishops in 1991.

The bishops were accused of endorsing double standards by advocating in the report Issues in Human Sexuality that gay clergy should remain celibate while accepting the possibility of gay relationships among the laity. Before his appointment to Canterbury, Dr Williams’s refusal to endorse this report when asked by Dr George Carey, his predecessor, is understood to have cost him the Diocese of Southwark.

His subsequent pledge, however, to line up behind the 1998 Lambeth Conference Resolution, even though he abstained from signing it at the time, has won him the support of all but the most hardline evangelicals.

He is likely to face heckling from the conservative wing when he addresses a national evangelical conference at Blackpool this year.

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