Good morning. At a ceremony later today, Sarah Mullally will be installed as the 106th archbishop of Canterbury. The first woman to take on the role in its near 1,500-year history, she becomes de facto head of the Anglican communion at a difficult and painful moment for the Church of England.
Mullally takes over an institution grappling with safeguarding failures, internal division and questions about its place in modern British public life. So what exactly is the job she is stepping into – and how much power does it still carry?
For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Harriet Sherwood, who recently retired after more than three decades at the Guardian, to understand the legacy Mullally inherits, and the choices ahead of her. But first, your headlines.
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In depth: ‘The role is high on profile but low on the power to enact change’
Sarah Mullally needs to unite as much of the church as she can. Photograph: Krisztián Elek/SOPA Images/ShutterstockPreviously the bishop of London, Sarah Mullally is a state-educated former NHS worker who rose to become England’s chief nursing officer. Regardless of gender, she is a very different prospect from her Old Etonian predecessor, Justin Welby, as this profile by my colleague Caroline Davies shows.
“It is fair to say that I have, both in my secular role as well as in the church, experienced misogyny at times,” Mullally said when she was confirmed as the new archbishop of Canterbury. Harriet Sherwood tells me “There are many who are very supportive of the appointment of a woman into the role,” but that is not a universal sentiment. And that is just one of the complexities of a role that is potentially high in profile but low on the power to enact change.
A shadowed legacy
Welby’s departure came under a substantial cloud over safeguarding. “He was criticised in a very significant report into the prolific abuser John Smyth,” Harriet explains, “and for not reporting the allegations properly when they first came to his attention in 2013. That meant Smyth could have been brought to justice.”
Welby was eventually forced to say he was “profoundly ashamed” of his final speech in the House of Lords, in which he had referenced a 14th-century beheading and said “if you pity anyone, pity my poor diary secretary”. About 130 boys are believed to have been victims of Smyth – a powerful lawyer and former chair of a conservative charity that ran evangelical camps – who died in 2018.
The issue of safeguarding still hangs over the whole church. Mullally herself has faced scrutiny – a complaint about her handling of an abuse case when she was Bishop of London was dismissed by Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell who found that Mullally had not committed any misconduct and that no further action was warranted – but Harriet says “there is quite a lot of confidence that she will handle it well”.
“I think the fact she is a woman makes a difference in terms of engagement with survivors, and she is also very capable and very calm,” she says. “One of the first things she said was that she wants the church to get on the front foot on safeguarding – which it hasn’t done.”
Mullally has described safeguarding as a “fundamental, non-negotiable responsibility”, with victims and survivors at the “heart of all we do”. Nevertheless the church in 2025 rejected adopting a fully independent safeguarding model.
A church divided
If safeguarding is one area where Mullally’s background is seen as a strength, the same does not apply across a divided global Anglican church.
“There are still churches that don’t recognise women priests at all,” Harriet points out, “and they therefore won’t recognise her leadership”.
That division is longstanding. “The church has been divided on gender and sexuality for a long time,” she says.
In February, the General Synod halted its work on LGBTQ+ reform after failing to reach consensus between conservative and liberal factions – ending years of work on allowing stand-alone services to bless same-sex civil marriages, and leaving existing restrictions in place on clergy having same-sex civil partnerships.
This timeline demonstrates how the issue has been a topic of debate in the church since 1979. “There is a lot of residual anger about the failure to resolve that,” Harriet says.
Harriet tells me that when Welby became archbishop, he undertook a huge effort to build relationships across the global church. “My sense,” she says, “is that Mullally will focus more on the Church of England, at least initially, because there is a lot of ‘steadying the ship’ to do here.”
Another controversy she will find on her hands is the church’s £100m Project Spire, aimed to address past connections to slavery, at a time when it is said hundreds of Britain’s churches may be forced to close in the next five years as the cost of maintaining heritage buildings becomes unmanageable. (Which is absolute catnip to online culture warriors who care much more about scoring points about the church being “woke” than actually going to church.)
A question of constitution
Welby’s tenure included hugely symbolic national moments – burying a queen and crowning a king – that Mullally may not face. The Church of England’s compulsory retirement age of 70 means she has, at most, six years in the role.
She steps into office, too, at a moment of wider constitutional change. With hereditary peers being removed from the House of Lords, questions about the place of Church of England bishops in parliament have not gone away.
“There are only two countries in the world that reserve seats for clergy in parliament: England and Iran. That tells you quite a lot,” Harriet notes.
“If you were designing a second legislative chamber from scratch, it’s very unlikely anyone would include 26 Church of England bishops. It’s also arguably an anachronism that the Church of England remains the established church, given long-term declines in attendance.”
But, she adds, there is little political appetite to revisit that settlement. “There’s very little drive to remove bishops from the Lords. Reform is slow and complex – it’s taken years just to get to the point of removing hereditary peers.”
What would success look like for Mullally?
“Honestly, success would look like calm and stability,” Harriet tells me. “The Church has been through a series of crises and real turmoil. The Smyth case was an existential moment. If Mullally can steady things, and smooth over divisions, that would already be significant progress.”
Harriet suspects Mullally “will avoid being overtly confrontational politically,” although there is one item in her in-tray that maybe needs a greater focus: the recent appropriation of Christian imagery by far-right populists.
Tommy Robinson, for example, led a “put the Christ back into Christmas” event in London last year. Some Anglican clergy – including the bishop of Kirkstall, Arun Arora, have called for Christians to reclaim the flag and their faith from rightwing activists, saying both were being desecrated by people seeking to divide the nation.
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