The chief responsibility of the leader of the Anglican Communion is not to be the last leader of the Anglican Communion, a burden that has weighed heavily on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, for several agonising years. By intervening in the deliberations of the bishops of the Episcopal Church of the United States in New Orleans, he raised the stakes as high as they could go, for had his pleas been flatly rejected a formal split of the Communion would have been inevitable, possibly within days. As it happened, they listened - and moved. Given how strongly American Episcopalians have been attached to provincial autonomy - the principle that no part of the Anglican Communion can dictate to any other part what its beliefs and practices should be - their decision to extend indefinitely their moratorium on consecrating homosexual bishops is a substantial shift in their understanding of what being an Anglican entails.

In the short term there will still be some breakdown in communion at the margins, as more extreme elements denounce the New Orleans formula as not good enough. There is already a small but significant number of Episcopalian clergy who have transferred their allegiance to African dioceses like Rwanda. The danger is that the spirit of rebellion will spread, and the Anglican Communion will gradually unravel, as a series of crises over church order, clashes of jurisdiction and even ownership of property force even moderately minded Anglicans to take sides. Some evangelical bishops in Africa in particular seem keen to impose something akin to provincial uniformity on the American Church, where no deviation from their own hard line regarding homosexuality is permitted and those who ever thought differently are required to repent. But such intransigence is not the Anglican way, and if they push much harder it is they who will be in schism. Dr Williams will have to be as firm with these African bishops recklessly fishing in troubled Episcopalian ...

The spectacle of queues forming outside banks with crowds desperate to withdraw their savings is one that is perhaps more redolent of Latin America than northern Europe. Yet the scenes witnessed at branches of Northern Rock might not simply concern one former building society turned bank but may prove to be the beginning of a wider crisis of confidence in the banking system itself. If so, then all of the guarantees ...

Pius Ncube has been Robert Mugabe's most outspoken critic, condemning the injustices of the regime that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees and its people to the brink of starvation. Now he has stepped down as Archbishop of Bulawayo, two months after allegations emerged of an affair with a church employee whose husband has brought a case against him. By the time he resigned the scandal had already damaged Archbishop ...

The pastoral letter published this week by the bishops of England and Wales, confirming the Catholic Church's commitment to education and the provision of schools, can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, it can be seen as a proud affirmation of the Church's record. Its schools are popular with parents for their traditional ethos, high expectations of pupils, strong sense of community and record of ...