Nurse, bishop and member of the Hogerhuis: the first female Archbishop has a long track record

“Hello, my name is bishop Sarah Mullally.” With those words, the first female leader of the Anglican Church introduced himself on Friday morning in a movie. Mullally (63) has been appointed by King Charles as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, with which she is the spiritual leader of the Church of England, the State Church of which the King is the head, and de facto also of the global Anglican community of 85 million believers.

Mullally said he was ‘very honored’ and to wish that everyone will be ‘decisive in hope, generous in spirit and determined in love’.

This appointment preceded a long -standing battle for many years. Even after women were admitted to the priest’s office in the 1990s, and talked about female bishops. The more conservative Anglicans, who had retained their Catholic traditions and rites since the separation of the Church of England in 1543, rebelled. They think it is theologically impossible that women can devote priests. Some of these Anglo Catholics were so angry about the arrival of female clergymen that they became Roman Catholic.

The more evangelical Anglicans – of whom a large part lives in the United States and Africa, also refuse female clergymen. They point to the Bible and the fact that Jesus had no female apostles.

Compromise

A compromise was therefore concluded for the United Kingdom in 2014: parishes may refuse a female pastor on theological grounds, and a male bishop may ‘fly in’ if their diocese has a woman in the head. The church has thus been given an exception to the law that advocates the same treatment of men and women, to the disappointment of the Pressiegroep Women and the Church (Watch).

But the women do push on. Since Libby Lane in 2014 Suffragaan (auxiliary bishop) was in stockport, 25 of the 42 dioceses have had a woman at the head. A change in the law also ensured that women were preferred if one of the 26 clergymen boarded in the British height house, instead of selection on seniority.

Sarah Mullally is one of them since she was the first wife of London in 2018. Before that she was auxiliary priest in South London, Kanunnik in the cathedral of Salisbury and auxiliary bishop of Crediton in Southwest England.

Zoom in

Career as a nurse

There she had a long career as a nurse, specialized in the treatment of cancer patients. Mullally was a member of the board of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London, and at the age of 39 became one of the most important advisers of the government in the field of health policy, the Chief Nursing Officer. She was knighted for her work in 2005. She is married to an Irish IT person and has two adult children.

When she took a seat in the Hogerhuis, she praised the British National Health Service: “I am the bishop I am through that first calling as a nurse. Compassion and healing are constant factors, and the heart I am.”

As Bishop of London, according to British media, she was busy with the modernization of the diocese. For decades, church visit in the United Kingdom has been declining (although the number of churchgoers increased slightly again in 2023 and 2024) and the solution was so far centralization and the closure of churches – to the displeasure of some parishes.

Scandal

The Church of England opened its doors for partners of the same sex, which can be blessed since 2023 even after fierce battle. Mullally was committed to it and called it “a moment of hope.” But getting married in the church is not yet possible.

But Mullally will mainly have to answer a series of scandals about child abuse, which was covered by the top of the Church of England. Her predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, resigned when it became known that he knew about abuse by a lay priest in children’s camps, but had not sufficiently warned the authorities.

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