Archbishop Williams supported a Vatican statement last week endorsing the idea of a “Robin Hood” tax on financial transactions and for a separation of retail and investment operations at banks that have relied on bailouts from public funds.

Image Most Rev. Rowan Williams Credit... Alberto Pizzoli/AFP — Getty

“These ideas — ideas that have been advanced from other quarters, religious and secular, in recent years — do not amount to a simplistic call for the end of capitalism, but they are far more than a general expression of discontent,” he said.

“If we want to take seriously the moral agenda of the protesters at St. Paul’s, these are some of the ways in which we should be taking it forward,” the article said, but it urged the protesters to be “a bit more specific,” arguing that the proposals made by the Vatican should become a springboard for debate. “If religious leaders and commentators in the U.K. and elsewhere could agree on these three proposals, not as a fixed agenda but as a common ground on which to start serious discussion, the struggles and questionings alike of protesters and clergy at St. Paul’s will not have been wasted.”

The article appeared hours after the authorities at the cathedral said they “unanimously agreed” to abandon plans to forcibly evict the protesters, following the intervention of Richard Chartres, bishop of London, the most senior Anglican figure in the city.

That came after days of turmoil within the church over what to do about the camp — a mass of hundreds of tents that is part of the Occupy protest movement. Two of the leaders at the historic church, Canon Giles Fraser and the dean, the Very Rev. Graeme Knowles, resigned in recent days.