[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
The new female Archbishop of Canterbury is, as many have mentioned, “the pure distilled essence of everything wrong with the Church of England.”
Her election came as no surprise in a country falling apart at the seams.
What we have here is a clown show that could have been produced by Keir Starmer’s Labour Party: a woman with thick air-blown ginger hair and square-frame Superman glasses. In photographs she appears wearing an immense miter larger than the one Pope Leo wears. In other hot takes she appears in bejeweled miters and rich vestments common in Russian Orthodoxy.
Even from a simple visual perspective, the traditional archbishop trappings don’t work here: her hair puffs up around the edges of her miters like a Harpo Marx wig.
Yet the issues here go deeper than hair and sex, though her sex, according to sacred apostolic tradition, would disqualify her from priestly ordination not to mention an office once held by St. Thomas Beckett.
As the Eastern Orthodox say, “Lord have mercy!”
The new archbishop, who is also a member of the House of Lords, is pro-abortion, pro-LGBT, pro-migrant, pro-Green, pro-euthanasia and pro-Palestine. She and her husband, Eamonn, have two children; this is practically the only conventional thing about her.
The Church of England (C of E) calls her the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, but that’s a lie. Dame Sarah Mullally is really the 34th Protestant holder of the office.
The last legitimate Archbishop of Canterbury was the 72nd holder of the Roman Catholic office instituted in 597, Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500-1558), an English aristocrat who ran afoul of King Henry XIII when the latter declared himself the Supreme Head of the English Church, a Church he invented.
Cardinal Pole called Henry XIII’s declaration heretical and dangerous, and refused to accept the king’s offer to make him the first C of E Archbishop of York. Enraged by the rejection, the king arrested members of Pole’s family, imprisoning the prelate’s mother, Margaret, before finally executing her and other Pole relatives in 1541.
After Henry’s death during the reign of Mary I, Catholicism in England enjoyed a temporary resurgence. Cardinal Pole was made Archbishop of Canterbury but his tenure was fraught with difficulties given the tension between the new Church and the one founded by that other King in the first century.
After Mary’s death-Pole died a mere twelve hours after the queen in 1558-the fantasy that Catholicism stood a chance of reclaiming England was put to rest.
During that period, the upstart Church not only stole the Catholic Church’s property, it eviscerated its monasteries, tortured and killed its priests from 1535 (namely Carthusian monks) to1681, repudiated its theology and practice, and then appropriated its offices and titles to imply a wholly fabricated continuity.
Since then it has been a down hill slide for the C of E.
In 1930, the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops approved the use of contraceptives in Britain. The following year, the Episcopal Church in the United States followed suit.
The year 1994 saw the C of E ordain female and openly gay priests. In 2002, the Church repealed its long term ban on divorced people remarrying until after a spouse’s death. Other reforms followed in 2014 when the consecration of women bishops was approved. In 2022, the Archbishop’s Council of the C of E approved a blessing ceremony for same sex couples.
The crowning glory of these reforms was the appointment of Sarah Mullally, a reputed hater of orthodox Christianity and someone primarily known as a manager and administrator with little interest in preaching the Gospel. Preaching the Gospel in the C of E was traded a long time ago for preaching that other gospel, the gospel of feminism, abortion, transgender and migrant rights….the gospel of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
The one silver lining in Mullally’s election is that the vast majority of the Anglican Communion still believes that Scripture requires a male-only episcopacy.
A statement from the majority Global South Fellowship of Anglicans (GSFA) was startlingly clear:
“We are deeply saddened that the person still perceived by many to be the spiritual leader of now some 100 million Anglicans worldwide has played a leading role in the Church of England’s departure from Anglican tradition and the clear teaching of Scripture in matters of marriage and sexuality.”
Another global group of conservative Anglicans, GAFCON, criticized Bishop Sarah’s election as proof that the English branch of the Church had “relinquished its authority to lead” because she has “repeatedly promoted unbiblical and revisionist teachings regarding marriage and sexuality.”
The C of E, with its soft-hearted and naive views of Islam-and in a country filled with Muslim migrants on the verge of civil war- and a king (King Charles) who as Supreme Head of the Church was careful to remove himself from Christianity when he said during his coronation ceremony that he was the Defender of all Faiths rather than the Christian Faith, has proven to be an empty Church without a message.
With the election of Mullally, the C of E has finally “progressed” into the orbit of total irrelevance.
It has become a tinted mirror of the secular culture; in American terminology, the C of E is the Democrat Party in pretty vestments.