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.
