Wasn’t it inevitable? Named early as a potential successor to the previous arse-bishop, the only thing that surprised me is that it took so long to appoint her. By ‘her’ I am, of course, referring to Dame Sarah Mullally who has just been announced as the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
Apart from anything else, this is one of the most pointless appointments in Anglicanism. The Archbishop of Canterbury has no formal powers, no jurisdiction over the Anglican Church outside of England, and the Metropolitan Diocese of Canterbury only covers part of the South of England. The role of head of the Church of England formally belongs to the monarch. Hell, the Archbishop of Canterbury does not even have any influence in Wales and Scotland.
Essentially, it is a non-role. The Archbishop of Canterbury is only considered to be primus inter pares (first among equals) and gets a seat, alongside other Lords Spiritual, in the House of Lords. It is one of these roles where little good can be achieved but, as we have seen from her predecessor who was unable to keep his gob shut on all manner of secular issues, a role in which the incumbent can do a great deal of damage. Mainly to the Church of England.
I must declare a link, however tenuous, to Sarah Mullally. As is well known, she was previously the Chief Nurse of England at the UK Department of Health (another pointless role as no formal powers go with it, and the chief nurses are totally subservient to the Chief Medical Officer). However, in that role I liked her and if you mentioned my name to her, from the deepest recesses of her memory, she may even recall me.
In my role as a professor of nursing we did correspond and, unlike one of her successors, she did not throw me under a bus for my views. I was a constant thorn in the side to governments of both colours regarding policy governing nursing education. Of course, I will never know for sure, but I know that my name was put forward to the Honours Committee more than once – one is not supposed to know – and I am sure that my outspokenness was what prevented me getting a gong.
All nursing honours nominations have to pass the eyes of the sitting Chief Nurse (so I suppose they do have some power) and one of her successors despised me, caused at least one Twitter pile-on over my views on nursing bursaries, and was in office at the time my name went to 10 Downing Street. Still, no hard feelings – what was it Groucho Marx said?
However, regarding Sarah Mullally, nobody survives in the higher echelons of nursing or at the Department of Health without being WAF (woke as fuck) and, while I was largely unaware of Dame Sarah’s views while in office at the Department of Health, it is becoming woefully clear that she is as WAF as they come. Gavin Ashenden, former Anglican and Chaplain to The Queen, expresses the appointment as a form of “ecclesial self-harm” and outlines just how woke the new Archbishop of Canterbury is.
Inevitably, she fully supports the alphabet soup of sexual identities. Andrew Doyle says that, from a single woke viewpoint a person expresses, you can confidently predict their remaining view on a range of topics such as immigrants, climate change and almost anything about which those of us right of centre hold sceptical views. Archbishop Sarah Mullally holds a full hand and has been busy letting us know, whenever a microphone is put in front of her.
I am a Roman Catholic, so why should I worry? Especially because we can expect to see a considerable influx of converts from both wings of the Church of England. Traditional views on women priests, which saw one influx decades ago, are held by some evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. The appointment of a female Bishop – Sarah Mullally – saw another. Her appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury may be the final ecclesiastical straw.
I have not yet heard her views on flags but I can predict she has reservations about the flag of St George flying in working-class areas of England. Even as a Roman Catholic and a fully paid up Celt – Scottish with Irish heritage – there are few better sights in the English countryside than the cross of St George flying from an Anglican church. I think we all know with which flag this could soon be replaced.
So here we are, history made and boxes ticked. The Church of England, which can’t fill its pews or decide what it believes, now has a leader who embodies its most fashionable uncertainties. It won’t matter that fewer people than ever attend its services or that the average parishioner could probably name more Kardashians than commandments. What matters is that the institution can congratulate itself on being ‘modern’. Perhaps, in time, the faithful remnant will find solace not in sermons or scripture, but in the comforting knowledge that at least the archbishop’s pronouns are correct.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
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(Photograph: Roger Harris, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
First up, it was a bit of surprise to see that Roger Watson was born in Rome – for some reason, I thought he was a native of Kingston-upon-Hull. Anyway, as a Scots Catholic myself, I sympathise with his puzzlement at this latest set back to so-called ecumenism. Pope Leo XIII’s declaration in the papal bull Apostolicae curae (1896) that Anglican orders are “absolutely null and utterly void” was set-back enough, but to add women’s (non) ordination into the mix and now this latest novelty is just madness. They’ll still have the prayer and tea get-togethers but they will (continue to) be pointless. The fact is, between these facts and the fact that we have another terrible pope in the Catholic Church, the future is far from bright for the restoration of any kind of unity.
As Roger Watson indicates, however, it really was inevitable. The new (as one of my more educated in ecclesiology friends calls the Anglican leader) Archlayman/woman had to be either a person of colour, female or trans. That was inevitable.
Like everything else these days however, the “diabolical disorientation” foretold at the most important religious event of the 20th century – the apparitions at Fatima in Portugal – is coming to a head and it will not be too long before there is some kind of divine intervention in our very sick world, in my humble opinion.
God gave us the solution in those apparitions in 1917, a way of ending the madness to come, a way to bring about world peace no less, but, thanks to successive defiant popes, and the workings of the ever-more worldly Vatican insiders, those instructions have been ignored – and we are literally paying the price.
And before readers of this comment dismiss the Church-approved Fatima apparitions (with two of the three seers canonised, third on the way) recall the words of the atheist George Bernard Shaw in the Preface to his play St Joan: “If Joan was mad, all Christendom was mad too; for people who believe devoutly in the existence of celestial personages are every whit as mad as the people who think they see them.”
A first rate bit of writing.
Appointment utterly predictable, as RW says the only oddity is why it took so long (presumably to buy off any opponents). Thinking more about this, the inevitable woke statements that are expected probably won’t result in a headlong rush to RC (sorry Patricia for the use of this name) because remaining Anglican churchgoers will just stop going, stop helping, stop giving and CofE will close yet more churches.
When will the first ‘not my King’ echo ‘not my Archbishop’ be heard?
Nathaniel,
No need to apologise to me, but you are a star anyway – I always appreciate humility. So few us around. In the last sermon I heard on the subject, the priest suggested the the virtue of humility is a gift: I disagree. Took a lot of hard work for me to get there, and I suspect you’re the same, Nathaniel!
One of the surest ways to get a message of disapproval across, is to withhold the money. Some years ago, a lay group in the USA, sick and tired of the modernist clergy in their Catholic parishes, had some look-a-like money printed – pretend dollar bills, with “no doctrine, no dollar” printed on the back. Brilliant.
Peter Principle?
Will,
In what way does the Peter principle apply to this newly promoted woman?
Will one hit wonder Kim Carnes reissue ‘she’s got Betty Davis eyes’ as ‘she’s got Michael Goves eyes’?
I’ll get my coat.