Sarah Mullally, once the country’s leading NHS nurse, later a trailblazing vicar in Sutton, has today been named as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman to be appointed to the position in more than 1,400 years.
Canterbury calling: Dame Sarah Mullally has had her appointment approved by the King and the Prime Minister
“Sarah’s brilliant,” one local church-goer who knows Mullally well, told Inside Croydon this morning.
Mullally will be the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury since Augustine arrived on these shores in 597AD.
This is the first occasion that women have been eligible for the role, as female bishops weren’t consecrated by the CofE in 2013, when the last Archbishop was chosen. A decade on from when women started being consecrated, they now make up close to one-third of all bishops in England.
Inevitably, Mullally will face a number of stern challenges as the most senior prelate of the established Church of England and head of the Anglican church around the world, not least resistance from deeply conservative elements within the CofE who object to the ordination of women, let alone their promotion to such an important position.
The Bishop of Croydon has been a woman, the Rt Rev Dr Rosemarie Mallett, since 2022. Yet there is one Croydon church where Bishop Mallett cannot visit, and which has been placed effectively under another diocese, because the resident vicar refuses to recognise a woman bishop.
Among Mullally’s other great tasks will be to try to stabilise the Church of England after it was rocked by the sexual abuse scandals and cover-ups which forced her predecessor, Justin Welby, to resign.
Resigned: Justin Welby was involved in covering up a sexual abuse scandal
Aged 63, from Woking, after leaving her Surrey Comprehensive school, Mullally trained as a nurse, doing her degree at South Bank Poly and working at St Thomas’s Hospital at Waterloo and the Royal Marsden in Sutton before, in 1999, becoming England’s youngest ever Chief Nursing Officer – for which she was made a Dame in 2005.
After more studying, multiple degrees and a series of curacies, in 2006, mother-of-two Mullally became the team rector at St Nicholas Church in Sutton. Since then she has risen rapidly through the church, first as Bishop of Crediton in Devon in 2015, then in 2018 as the first female Bishop of London, a position which has seen her take up a seat in the House of Lords.
Her appointment as ABC gives Mullally strong connections to Croydon, where so many of her predecessors have lived over the past thousand years: 11 of them are buried in the borough – six at what is now known as Croydon Minster, and five at St Mary’s, Addington, close to the former bishop’s residence, Addington Palace.
To this day, the Archbishop of Canterbury gets to appoint people to the Court of Governors of the Whitgift Foundation, founded in medieval times by one of her predecessors and which operates today as the Croydon’s largest landlord, with two large private schools, a care home and almshouses.
Churchyard: five Archbishops of Canterbury are buried at St Mary’s Addington
Mullally’s appointment had to be approved by King Charles III, and follows a third meeting on the subject for the Crown Nominations Commission, chaired by Britain’s one-time top spook, Lord Jonathan Evans, the former head of MI5. The 17-strong Commission needed a two-thirds majority to approve Mullally’s appointment.
Mullally will become Archbishop of Canterbury formally at a ceremony in Canterbury Cathedral in January, to be followed by an enthronement service.
Today, Mullally said that she has responded to this new ministry, “in the same spirit of service to God and to others that has motivated me since I first came to faith as a teenager”.
She said, “At every stage of that journey, through my nursing career and Christian ministry, I have learned to listen deeply – to people and to God’s gentle prompting – to seek to bring people together to find hope and healing.”
The post of Archbishop has remained vacant for nearly a year since Welby quit following a report into his handling of the worst abuse scandal in the Church’s history.
An independent review found John Smyth, an evangelical Christian, had perpetrated brutal sexual, physical and mental abuse against more than 120 boys and young men since the late 1970s. The review also found that Smyth’s “abhorrent abuse” could have been exposed four years earlier if Archbishop Welby had contacted the authorities.
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A radio news flash this morning have brief news on this.
What surprised me then was it sounded like the Archbishop of Canterbury is appointed by a Government department.
The ‘Crown Nominations Commission’ helpfully explains this.
That is different from a ‘conclave’ of Cardinals electing a new Pope.
Yep. It’s been that way since about 1534.
And I don’t mean just after half-past three.
Though it is probably the first time they’ve had a public consultation on the appointment.
Please excuse the ‘have news’ which should of course be ‘had news’. I don’t know where that came from.
ABC as an acronym for Archbishop of Canterbury is a new one on me!
Let’s hope she can get a grip on the church’s legacy of abuse. I am still horrified that one of her predecessors, George Carey, kept files on abusive priests in a cabinet labelled ‘naughty boys’. As a women I hope she’ll sweep away all the cover-ups and clear the abusers out