The Archbishop of Canterbury designate

The announcement yesterday of the nomination of Dame Sarah Mullally as the next Archbishop of Canterbury caught the headlines amongst so much else. I was a little surprised, having thought that the Anglican powers-that-be would perhaps wait until the next appointment to Canterbury or York to advance a woman.

It is now over twenty years since I left the Church of England, and then from a strongly Anglo-Catholic position. Such an appointment no longer concerns me directly. 

However the Church of England is part of our constitution and national establishment, and that fact is appreciated by people who are Catholics in full peace and communion. 

I still have Anglican friends and am aware of an Anglican tradition that cannot be happy with this appointment and what it implies, and who, dare I say it, are running out of sand in which to bury their heads like ostriches.

Dame Sarah’s views are mixed on issues where faith and contemporary social issues meet. She has, perhaps as a former nurse, been steadfast in her opposition to the Assisted Dying Bill. Less reassuring are comments she has made, which are both worrying, as well as gnomic, on abortion  and same-sex blessings.

The media stress  is on her being the first woman to be nominated to the Primacy of All England - no-one has yet found a transgender predecessor. During the discussions about the Church of England legislating for ‘Women Bishops’ I remember the suggestion being made that the two Archbishoprics might be reserved for men as a concession to unity and the idea of ‘male headship’ if and when women were allowed to become ‘bishops’. That has clearly gone by the board. 

Those who speak of and fear the ‘Feminisation’ of Christianity in our society may well see their anxieties realised as the public face of the national Church becomes ‘Mother’ in God, not Father.

For Anglicanism as a whole I cannot see it going well, as has already been indicated, with Evangelicals focussed on the issue of male headship, nor with Global South Anglicans who are often of that Evangelical tradition. Another nail or two, or five or ten in the coffin of the Anglican Communion.

Ecumenical relationships may not suffer with the Lutheran churches that already have women ‘bishops’. Judging by some of the positive ‘mood music’ responses about her appointment coming out from some in Rome relations with the Holy See will doubtless continue at a polite level of meetings, but I imagine joint services at one of the Roman basilicas will be less likely. For the Orthodox there will probably be a much more substantial and suitable barrier, so a trip to the Phanar is not very likely.

In addition to those issues there is the dismal inheritance of the Church of England. The Welby years and Covid have done nothing for church attendance, many parishes feel they are being discriminated against in favour of headline grabbing initiatives to give away the Church Commissioners money, and the continuing issues around clerical and lay abuse of individuals within the Church.

This, of course, brings us back to Justin Welby. Without doubt this incompetent, self-satisfied, bullying little man has been, with the sole exception of the appalling heretic Thomas Cranmer, the worst ever Archbishop of Canterbury. That is no mean, or desirable, achievement. He is the first amongst more than a hundred predeceases  to have to resign for utter incompetence. Even the pluralist Stigand in the eleventh century was at least a patron of the arts.

Justin Welby pushed through the appointment of women bishops, finally destroying residual Anglican claims to any degree of Catholicity, turned a blind eye to abuse by his Evangelical friends, yet obstinately traduced the reputation of one of the most distinguished bishops of the twentieth century ( and there have not been many of them ) blithely went along with closing all churches in Covid - his Easter Holy Communuin celebrated on his kitchen table being the highlight, and which I know, caused one friend to swim the Tiber, and his involvement in the liturgical shambles that was the King’s Coronation.

Dame Sarah has been passed a bitter chalice, but hopefully cannot do worse. Hopefully.

St Theodore of Canterbury

Today is inter alia the feast of St Theodore of Canterbury, often known from his birthplace as Theodore of Tarsus (602-690). In addition to being the Archbishop who is credited with beginning the creation of  the parochial system in England in the years after his appointment to Canterbury in 669 his intellectual importance as a scholar before he came to England and its legacy has come to be appreciated in recent years thanks to the work of  Michael Lapidge in his 1995 study of Theodore. Lapidge's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography life of the saint can be read here. He emerges as a man with the qualities of a Lanfranc or an Anselm.

St Theodore of Canterbury

A modern icon from Aidan Hart Icons

Image: forallsaints.wordpress.com

Gravesite of  St Theodore at St. Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury

Image:Wikipedia
 

It was Sir Frank Stenton in his Anglo Saxon England who pointed to the cultural breadth of the Church at the time when he described the episcopal consecration in 685 at York by St Theodore, the last known student of the school of Athens, of one of the greatest, and last, products of the Hiberno-Scottish monastic tradition, St Cuthbert.

Archbishop William Warham

Today is the 480th anniversary of the death in 1532 of Archbishop William Warham of Canterbury, the last pre- reformation holder of the Primacy. Born circa 1450 he had held the see of Canterbury since 1504.

Archbishop Warham in 1527

Portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger

Image: Wikipedia

The biography of him by J J Scarisbrick in the Oxford DNB can be read here  and there is another, illustrated online account of him here.  

Warham appears to have been a good example of the late medieval English episcopate - devout, intelleigent, conscientious and loyal, but outflanked by men with greater determination, be they Cardinal Thomas Wolsey or King Henry VIII. His death removed a man who at his advanced age was beginning to realise and resist the challenge the Church now faced, and paved the way for the elevation of Thomas Cranmer.

I think the portrait suggests his character very well. The Primatial cross with his arms and the mitre, covered in pearls and with a seed pearl ground may well be depictions of his actual pontificalia. Holbein's drawing for the painting survives in the Royal collection at Windsor:

Image: copyright H.M. The Queen -The Royal Collection and arthistory.about.com   

Vacancy at Canterbury

So the long-rumoured departure of the Archbishop of Canterbury is coming about at the end of the year, as reported in, for example Archbishop of Canterbury to step down.

My reason for commenting is the same as in my post A new tenant at Lambeth Palace? from September last year, that is, that I have always thought, and indeed said, this was a likely outcome from the time of Dr Williams' appointment. In saying that it is not just case of guessing what someone might do but also reflecting on someone who apparently sees being Archbishop and Primate as another job on the career path, and if academic life looks more attractive, well, you go off there. The former Bishop of Durham recently made a similar move, and there are some other previous precedents.

It appears to me to be somewhat lacking in a due sense of ecclesial order and responsibility, and dealing with the problems facing the community over which you have exercised authority. Is there not something here of pursuing your own liberal agenda, and then when it all gets too much, going off to a comfortable academic post and leaving others to pick up the pieces and tidy up the mess?

A new tenant at Lambeth Palace?

I do not, of course, know whether the report in today's Sunday Telegraph that the Archbishop of Canterbury intends to resign next year and return to academic life, and so enable his successor to prepare for the next Lambeth Conference, is true or not. He could, in fact, remain in office for another decade. In many ways it now makes no difference to me who is Archbishop of Canterbury, though it does occur to me that suitable candidates to succeed him are few and far between.

Further Dr Williams has done more than enough harm to the Church of England, starting at very least from his part is establishing "Affirming Catholicism" and its legacy of politically correct liberalism posing as serious theology. If he does now run away screaming from the mess he has helped create who could blame him? Unless, that is, one thinks he should have the gumption to try to clear up that very mess.

So why am I commenting, other than just being bitchy? Simply because I have predicted such a move by him for years, as many of my friends can testify - so you did n't hear it first from the Sunday Telegraph, I was in there first.