Standing up last month in Britain’s House of Lords to oppose legislation that would allow medically assisted dying for terminally ill patients, Sarah Mullally, the newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury, spoke from personal experience. As a onetime nurse, she said, she “had the privilege to be with many people as they die.”
That speech, little noticed at the time, may offer a glimpse into how Archbishop-designate Mullally, 63, plans to shape one of the world’s oldest and most complicated religious offices. With her appointment as the 106th archbishop, the first woman to hold the post, she becomes not only the highest-ranking cleric in the Church of England, but also the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide.
At heart, however, experts on the church predicted that she would be a pastoral leader, focused on the caring and tending of her flock.
“Washing feet has shaped my Christian vocation as a nurse, then a priest, then a bishop,” Archbishop-designate Mullally said in Canterbury Cathedral on Friday, moments after her appointment was announced.
“In the apparent chaos which surrounds us, in the midst of such profound global uncertainty,” she said, her soft voice almost lost in the vast, echoing nave, “the possibility of healing lies in acts of kindness and love.”
Like her predecessor Justin Welby, Archbishop-designate Mullally had a full career outside of the church before ascending its ranks. In addition to nursing cancer patients, she was an administrator in the National Health Service and the chief nursing officer of England, the youngest person ever to hold that job.
Archbishop Welby had worked as a finance executive for a French oil company before going into the ministry. He traveled tirelessly, much as he had in the oil industry. Smooth and cosmopolitan, he seemed at times as much a diplomat as a cleric.
Archbishop-designate Mullally projects a humbler image. Her speech on Friday echoed Pope Francis, who washed the feet of others as a gesture of humility. She has talked about her dyslexia, which she has said makes reading and writing difficult. But though her nursing roots suggest a more stay-at-home, caregiver approach, it should not imply that she does not also want an influential voice in Britain’s affairs.
As bishop of London, her current position, she placed herself in the middle of the church’s most charged issues. She was chairwoman of a working group that debated same-sex marriage and presented principles under which priests could bless these couples, even if the church stopped short of formally recognizing their unions.
She has been blunt about the church’s failure to protect young people, a scandal that led to Archbishop Welby’s downfall, after the publication of a report that said he had failed to pursue a proper investigation into claims of abuse of boys and young men decades ago at Christian summer camps.
In arguing against the assisted dying legislation, Archbishop-designate Mullally warned that it would threaten the most vulnerable in society. Suffering from complex medical conditions, they could feel pressure to end their lives prematurely, particularly if it spared their families huge medical bills.
“If passed,” she declared, “the bill will signal that we are a society that believes that some lives are not worth living.”
Archbishop-designate Mullally said the National Health Service needed to provide adequate palliative care and hospice services. Turning hospitals into agents for assisted dying, she warned, could have unpredictable, corrosive effects. Drawing on her faith, she celebrated the sanctity of life.
“As a nurse, a priest, a daughter and a granddaughter, I have had the privilege to be with many people as they die,” Archbishop-designate Mullally said. “I have known people to experience some of the most valuable days of their life as it comes to an end, including those with terminal illnesses.”
“Much of the debate is about fear,” she said, adding, “life is not something to be managed or limited when it becomes difficult.”
Her objections will not prevent the bill, which is still being deliberated, from becoming law. The House of Lords, the unelected upper chamber of the Parliament, has the right to amend legislation sent to it by the House of Commons. But it almost never blocks a bill after it has passed the Commons.
Still, Archbishop-designate Mullally’s intervention shows she has no qualms about speaking out, despite the fact that her predecessor was criticized by politicians for inserting himself into these debates. Some complain that even giving seats to bishops in the House of Lords is an undemocratic anachronism.
Time, more than anything else, might limit Archbishop-designate Mullally’s ambitions. She will be 64 when she is formally installed next year, which means she will serve only six years before reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70.
“In one sense, it’s a short-term appointment,” said Andrew Atherstone, a professor of modern Anglicanism at the University of Oxford. “Justin was 57 when he got the job, so he had 13 years, which is enough time to make epoch-changing decisions.”
In 2014, Archbishop Welby pushed through an overhaul, over fierce resistance, that allowed women to become bishops. It was perhaps his most lasting achievement and the one that opened the door to the appointment of Bishop Mullally.
But he failed to resolve other disputes, notably over same-sex marriage. The prolonged internal debate, over which he presided, managed to alienate conservatives and reformers alike. Though Archbishop-designate Mullally has called for more inclusive language, Professor Atherstone said he did not expect her to push for a shift in the church’s current position, which she supports.
One area where she may chart a different course is in her relations with the Anglican Communion, a far-flung archipelago of churches in the United States, Latin America, Asia and Africa, many run by bishops who hold different views from those in the Church of England. Archbishop Welby invested a lot of energy in trying to forge more unity in the Anglican Communion.
“My one reservation about Justin Welby was that he seemed to want to create a mini-papacy,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, an ecclesiastical historian and expert on the Church of England at Oxford. “You can’t do that now. You cannot dictate the range of opinions in the Anglican Communion.”
In her speech on Friday, Archbishop-designate Mullally said she recently attended Anglican services in Brazil, Canada and Barbados, and was struck by how she could follow the liturgy seamlessly in each country. But she evinced no grand ambitions about seeking a similar doctrinal consistency across these churches.
“In an age that craves certainty and tribalism,” she said, “Anglicanism offers something quieter but stronger: shared history, held in tension, shaped by prayer and lit from within by the glory of Christ.”
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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