Today, a former nurse made history by becoming the first woman to lead the centuries-old mother church of the world’s 85 million Anglicans as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Sarah Mullally, 63, officially takes over the job after her predecessor left because of an abuse incident, according to AFP.
Around 2,000 people, including Prince William and his wife Catherine, were there for the historic ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral in southeast England. The former midwife was officially installed.
As is customary, Mullally knocked three times on the cathedral’s west door with a staff to ask to be let in.
The local school kids asked her why she had come when they saw her in her bright yellow-gold robes.
She said, “I am sent as archbishop to serve you, to tell you about Christ’s love, and to worship and love him with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.”
The ritual ended with Mullally sitting on two different thrones.
The seats stand for the two jobs that the person has: as a bishop in the diocese of Canterbury and as the spiritual leader of Anglicans all over the world.
Justin Welby, Mullally’s predecessor, said in November 2024 that he would step down as leader of the Church of England because he had failed to deal with an abuse issue.
He quit after a report said that the Church of England had hidden a serial abuse case from the 1970s and that he had not told the police about the abuse when he found out about it in 2013.
Head nurse
Mullally has said that she is “doing all I can to make the Church safer and also help victims and survivors of abuse.”
She told the BBC last week that the church was “trying to become more trauma-informed by listening to survivors and victims of abuse.”
In the 1530s, King Henry VIII broke away from the Roman Catholic Church and made the Church of England the official church of the realm.
The British monarch is the highest authority, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is considered as the spiritual leader of Anglicans all over the world.
Mullally is the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury. The first one was chosen in the late sixth century. He is married and has two children.
She worked for Britain’s National Health Service, which is controlled by the government, for more than thirty years. In 1999, she became the chief nursing officer for England.
She was become a priest in 2002 and became the first woman Bishop of London in 2018. This was only four years after the church started permitting women bishops following years of intense fighting between factions.
Some Anglican churches have allowed women to be bishops for a long time. The first woman bishop was appointed in the United States in 1989.
Laurent Mbanda, the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Rwanda, is one of many who still opposes it.
He has said in the past that “most of the Anglican Communion still believes that the Bible requires a male-only episcopacy.”
More over 40 of England’s 108 bishops are now women, and the same is true for priests. This is because women were initially allowed to be priests in the early 1990s.
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