The next Archbishop of Canterbury is no stranger to firsts. After a rapid rise through the ranks of the NHS, Sarah Mullally became the youngest ever chief nursing officer in 1999 (for which she was later knighted). After a midlife career change into the priesthood, she was just the third woman ever to become a bishop in the Church of England in 2015. Two years later she was promoted again to become the first ever female Bishop of London (the third-most senior cleric in the church).
And so, in many ways, her accession as the 106th incumbent of the throne of St Augustine but the first woman comes as little surprise. She has, after all, been blazing a trail for most of her career. Mullally was by some distance the most experienced and senior bishop who was young enough to still be appointable in the wake of Justin Welby’s resignation as archbishop. On top of her impressive NHS background, she has also been a calm and competent administrator of the sometimes fractious and divided Diocese of London, and helped modernise and professionalise that institution after two decades under her more patrician and old-fashioned predecessor.
Perhaps the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC), the secretive committee convened to make the appointment, decided what the C of E needed was a safe pair of hands. After a year of turbulence, as the leaderless church was buffeted by a slew of safeguarding scandals, the group of 17 bishops, vicars and lay people asked to choose Welby’s successor have landed on the steady, unhurried, if somewhat bland, figure of Mullally to calm the storm.
And for all that she is a safe choice, her very gender marks her out as a new direction for the 1,500-year-old national church. The Archbishop of Canterbury is probably the only Christian figure to still retain some status and profile in secular contemporary Britain. And now, for the first time, this pastor to the nation and spiritual figurehead is a woman. Even for those no longer paying attention to what the church is saying or doing, Mullally’s accession presents a new, modern face for an old institution that is changing rapidly.
This could be particularly helpful in turning the page on the abuse scandals which dogged Welby’s tenure and ultimately led to his downfall. A female archbishop is likely to be received as a more compassionate, even a safer, presence than any of her male colleagues also in the running for the post. And yet here also Mullally poses an intriguing tension – she’s both a safe choice and yet also risky. For she is not without skeletons in her own closet too. Most notably, her involvement in a tragic episode when a former priest in her diocese of London killed himself during a botched safeguarding investigation. A disgruntled corrupt diocesan official spread false rumours the isolated gay vicar Alan Griffin paid for sex with underage boys, prompting a heavy-handed probe by the much professionalised safeguarding team at the diocese. By the time they realised it was all a wild goose chase, Griffin was dead.
No doubt the CNC thoroughly vetted all candidates during their deliberations, and presumably decided Mullally could ride out any outcry over her appointment. Because if Mullally is to successfully draw a line under the safeguarding crisis and rebuild the church’s reputation and moral standing, she will have to quickly neutralise any sense she is just another bishop with a history of failure in handling abuse cases.
The other flashpoint is the church’s agonies over same-sex relationships. Mullally oversaw for several years the Living in Love and Faith project, which ultimately led to the C of E introducing blessings for gay couples for the first time (but, notably, not gay marriage in church). She is known to be in favour of the blessings, and yet is not seen as a partisan attached to either the liberal or conservative factions and might be able to find a narrow middle-ground compromise solution to the saga. The hierarchy will be hoping her measured approach might help defuse the tension and animosity which has built up between the two sides over the past three years as they try to land the plane and move on.
Many observers had pre-emptively ruled out Mullally claiming the throne because of her age; by the time she takes up the post she will only be six years away from mandatory retirement at 70. Almost all archbishops serve a minimum of a decade in the role, as it takes time to get to grips with the byzantine machinery of the C of E, let alone win a hearing beyond the confines of the church. By the time Mullally has her feet under the table, attention will already be drifting towards the 107th archbishop, her successor.
And so perhaps she will function as a de facto interim archbishop – a sensible and noncontroversial figure to try and resolve the gay blessings farrago and clean the safeguarding slate, before handing over a refreshed church to a younger and more dynamic successor. In that sense her gender masks the lack of radicalism in her appointment. She may be the first woman in the role, but in every other respect she is the safest and most conventional archbishop on offer to an unsettled church craving stability.
[Further reading: The confessions of Justin Welby]
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