by Gavin Ashenden on substack
Magisterium, authority, and the limits of the Anglican experiment
The protest against Sarah Mullally goes further than the eccentric raising of alarm during a formal ritual at St Paul’s Cathedral.
Counting Archbishops and Counting Authority
The Church of England claims that Sarah Mullally is the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury. At first sight, the Catholic objection to this numbering — which insists that she is in fact only the 36th Protestant archbishop, following the 69 Catholic Archbishops of Canterbury from St Augustine to Cardinal Reginald Pole — might look like little more than historical pedantry, or a reflexively angry protest against a Protestant revisionist account that functions as state propaganda rather than accurate history.
In fact, the difference between these two ways of counting exposes the deepest structural and spiritual weakness of the Church of England. This is not simply a Catholic criticism wounded by the expulsion of the Western Church from this island and the persecution that followed it, but also an attempt to explain the protest that erupted at Sarah Mullally’s election service in St Paul’s Cathedral.
The initial argument runs like this. The Church of England numbers its archbishops from Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 597, yet it formally repudiated papal authority at the Reformation. There were therefore only sixty-nine Archbishops of Canterbury in communion with Rome, ending with Cardinal Reginald Pole. Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the English Reformation, therefore becomes the seventieth — the first of a new Protestant succession.
Theological Rupture, Not Administrative Continuity
The changes ran very deep. The nature of Christian ministry was radically changed. The nature of the Mass was repudiated and replaced. The sacrificing priesthood became a preaching presbytership. Bishops became managers rather than successors to the apostles, since the succession had been both broken and repudiated. The Church became an uneasy balance between congregational autonomy and managerial episcopacy.