Archbishop Rowan Williams announced today that he will be stepping down as Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of December. The announcement is here.He was in Rome earlier this week and celebrated Vespers, together with Pope Benedict, at the Church of San Gregorio Magno, the Pope who sent monks to evangelize England. Here is part of the homily which Williams preached:

Your Holiness, dear brothers and sisters, it would be wrong to suggest that we enter into contemplation in order to see one another more clearly; but if anyone were to say that contemplation is a luxury in the Church, something immaterial for the health of the Body, we should have to say that without it we should be constantly dealing with shadows and fictions, not with the reality of the world we live in. The Church is called upon to show that same prophetic spirit which is ascribed to St Gregory, the capacity to see where true need is and to answer Gods call in the person of the needy. To do this, it requires a habit of discernment, penetration beyond the prejudices and clichs which affect even believers in a culture that is so hasty and superficial in so many of its judgements; and with the habit of discernment belongs a habit of recognizing one another as agents of Christs grace and compassion and redemption.And such a habit will develop only if we are daily learning the discipline of silence and patience, waiting for the truth to declare itself to us as we slowly set aside the distortions in our vision that are caused by selfishness and greed. In recent years, we have seen developing a vastly sophisticated system of unreality, created and sustained by acquisitiveness, a set of economic habits in which the needs of actual human beings seem to be almost entirely obscured. We are familiar with a feverish advertising culture in which we are persuaded to develop unreal and disproportionate desires. We are all Christians and their pastors included in need of the discipline that purges our vision and restores to us some sense of the truth of our world, even if that can produce the torment of knowing more clearly how much people suffer and how little we can do for them by our unaided labours.