By Tim Wyatt
Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London, has been selected as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, a historic first for the Church of England. She becomes the first woman to hold the role in the church’s history.
She grew up in Surrey and after her A-levels was determined to become a nurse. She quickly rose up the ranks at several hospitals, picking up a masters degree in the process, eventually becoming, in 1999, the youngest chief nursing officer for England.
Initially she combined this role with unpaid posts as a part-time priest in south London, before moving into full-time church work in 2004. She was appointed a dame in 2005 for her contribution to nursing and midwifery. She and her husband, Eamonn, have two children.
In 2012 she took a role as canon treasurer at Salisbury Cathedral before becoming in 2015 the Bishop of Crediton, a junior post in the Exeter diocese, one of the first women to be made a bishop after the rules changed a year earlier.
Despite this somewhat obscure role, Bishop Mullally (née Bowser) was catapulted into national church politics after being asked to lead safeguarding reforms (one survivor had requested a female bishop spearhead this, finding them more trustworthy than the rest of the male-dominated episcopate).
Perhaps in reward for this, she was promoted in 2017 to be Bishop of London, the third most senior cleric in the church. She succeeded Richard Chartres, in many ways a figure from a different era when bishops were more like princes of their own fiefdom.
While the London diocese was one of very few bucking the national trend towards intractable decline in attendance, and was boldly leading experimentation through “planting” new types of church, it was also something of a mess when Bishop Mullally arrived, riven with factions between warring theological tribes and dogged by safeguarding troubles.
With her experience as an NHS leader and administrator, Sarah Mullally was effectively asked to modernise and professionalise the diocese, which she has done effectively, but not without controversy. Some hackles have been raised by her managerial and bureaucratic approach, especially among London’s strong contingent of traditionalists who reject women’s ordination as either priests or bishops.
She was also drawn into a scandal over a former priest who was falsely accused of sexually abusing minors and killed himself before a botched safeguarding investigation concluded he was innocent.
As Bishop of London she also played a key role leading the Church of England’s response to the Covid pandemic, but this may diminish her appeal to some clergy still sore about being told not to conduct even solo worship in their churches during the stay-at-home orders.
For many years she led the Living in Love and Faith project, a church-wide consultation and research project which explored questions around marriage and sexuality. On this, Bishop Mullally has often kept her own counsel, but that work eventually led to the Prayers of Love and Faith, services of blessings for same-sex couples now available at CofE churches.
This development has prompted years of bitter rowing between conservatives and liberals across the church, although she has more recently let other bishops step up to try (and mostly fail) to corral the squabbling tribes towards a settlement.
In many ways, Sarah Mullally was by a distance the most senior and experienced bishop who was appointable to the role of Archbishop of Canterbury: the only more senior figure, Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, 67, is too close to the mandatory retirement age of 70 and ruled himself out by joining the appointment committee.
And yet she was not seen as the frontrunner for the job. Partly this is because of her age — at 63 she will get only six years in the role when, typically, archbishops serve at least a decade.
Sarah Mullally is sometimes viewed as more of an administrator than a charismatic figure. She is not known as a partisan for any church faction and plays little role in the main theological debates.
Her selection is possibly a sign the church hopes to turn the page on the damaging Welby era of safeguarding scandal through a de facto interim appointment.
Perhaps the plan is to rebuild things under the steady hand of a practised administrator in Sarah Mullally for a few years, before handing on to someone better placed to grab the country’s attention as a spiritual leader and pastor.
