On March 10, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, had a private audience with the Pope at the Vatican.
On March 17, we read the announcement of Williams’ decision to resign his position as head of the Anglican Church.

Surely this is the stuff on which conspiracy theorists thrive. Is the Archbishop of Canterbury ready to cross the Tiber? (The Catholic spin on the news.) Did the Pope show Williams compromising photographs of the Archbishop in flagrante delicto, demanding his resignation as a price for the photographs not being leaked to the press? (The Obama/New York Times spin on the news.) Is the Archbishop a closet Catholic or a closet homosexual? Is the Pope a wise counsellor to whom the Archbishop turned in a moment of spiritual crisis or is the Pope a cynical Jesuitical blackmailer intent on destroying his rivals by the most Machiavellian of means? My own view is that the Catholic spin may not be true but it is at least sane! And, who knows, it might be true.

I would, however, like to posit another possibility. The one thing that Rowan Williams and the Holy Father have in common, which nobody can deny, is that they have both written for the St. Austin Review. Williams, when he was Bishop of Wales, shortly before his election to Canterbury, wrote an article for StAR entitled “Russian Theology: Challenge and Invitation” (February 2002); the Holy Father, as Cardinal Ratzinger, shortly before his ascent to the Throne of Peter, wrote an article on “Universality and Catholicity” for which he granted StAR the first English-language rights. We published the article after he’d become Pope (November/December 2005) because of delays in getting it translated. As such, StAR is perhaps the only magazine in the world for which the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury have both written. This is certainly a feather in our cap (to say the least!).

But now for my own spin on the connection between Williams’ visit to the Pope in the Vatican and his surprise announcement of his resignation a week later. I think that Williams and the Pope were discussing the topics of their next articles for StAR. At some point, the Holy Father broke the news to the Archbishop that the St. Austin Review might be reluctant to publish an article by Williams whilst he is occupying a seat from which drips the blood of the English Martyrs. Forced to choose between the See of Canterbury and the prospect of seeing his name on the cover of such an illustrious journal, he had little option but to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury. I applaud the virtue and wisdom of his decision and look forward to receiving his next article!