by Peter Mullen, TCW
MOST appropriately Dame Sarah Mullally has chosen today, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Lady Day, for her enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury. We should notice that this Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dame of the British Empire, Peer of the Realm and ecclesiastical career bureaucrat has decided that it smacks of elitism to preserve the practice – dating back to AD 597 – of enthronement. Instead, Dame Sarah will merely be installed – which I’m afraid only makes me think of stairlifts and fitted kitchens.
We should offer our prayers for her, and she will certainly need them, given the deep hole into which the Church of England has dug itself. Only last Saturday, former Archbishop Rowan Williams wrote a long article in the Daily Telegraph in which he said: ‘I don’t know whether the Anglican Communion can survive.’
In fact, its break-up is already well on the way. The unsecularised churches of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) – whose members greatly outnumber those in England – have denounced the introduction of prayers in church for homosexual couples as ‘a schismatic development which breaks faith with those provinces who remain faithful to the historic faith’.
The most dramatic and significant aspect of GSFA’s response is that they have declared no confidence in the Archbishop of Canterbury and they no longer regard Canterbury as primus inter pares of the worldwide Anglican communion. They have looked elsewhere for believing bishops to be their fathers in God. GFSA people – many of whom are African – are serious, traditional Christians who suffer constant persecution by Muslims. These people have not responded positively to former Archbishop Rowan Williams’s admonishment, repeated by Justin (actually ‘Just out’) Welby that ‘the Church has a lot of catching up to do with secular morality’.