"These difficulties are not all of a merely disciplinary nature. Some extend to essential matters of faith and morals."

At a subsequent news conference, Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Vatican office in charge of relations with other Christian denominations, made clear that one of those matters was homosexuality.

Williams, seated beside him, said the Vatican's concern weighed very heavily on him as he looked toward an emergency meeting of the Anglican Communion's leaders in Britain later this month. Its focus is the issue of homosexuality.If Williams is a person of compassion, one who represents the unconditional love of Jesus, he may wish also to consider those who most personally deal with this issue: gay Anglicans.

365Gay.com reports that following the confab between the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Kirler, general secretary of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, took to the BBC airwaves with a warning: To bring attention to the plight of queer people in the Anglican Church, LGCM members may engage in acts of "civil disobedience," including a hunger strike.

The Archbishop is in a sticky situation, torn between gay and pro-gay voices calling for love and justice and legalistic anti-GLBT voices crying out for Bible literalism. The Telegraph feels the cleric's pain:

Poor Dr. Rowan Williams, who at the beginning of last year was living peacefully as the Archbishop of Wales and planning this month to speak at the Lesbian and Gay Christian movement jamboree in Manchester. He can have no satisfactory response to all this. If he throws out the gay-friendly branches of the Anglican Communion, he will disgust his own supporters in this country, and lose the wealthiest churches abroad that acknowledge him. If he tells the Southern Hemisphere that the Episcopal church of America has a perfect right to elect an openly gay bishop if it wants to, he will lose a lot of his own wealthiest parishes in England to a well-organised and completely ruthless evangelical campaign that aims to leave him a powerless figurehead even within his own church, as he is outside it. If he does nothing the row will just go on for years.

As a bishop and theologian, Rowan Williams did peace, love, and understanding pretty well. No British theologian has done more than he has to translate into biblical language the idea that the purpose of sex is the expression and strengthening of mutual love, and that this matters far more than the orifices involved, or the gender of the lovers. He can even put the argument in English, as well as in theologese. He told The Telegraph's Graham Turner that "there is a good case for recognition of same-sex partnerships if they are stable and faithful. I would not, however, call it marriage. If physical sex is not always tied to procreation, then same-sex relationships might be legitimate in God's eyes".

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