Care and Fracture at Canterbury |
This article, situated within the context of the Anglican Communion in the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, and the wider Commonwealth, continues a reflection first published on October 8 of last year, written in the immediate aftermath of events that exposed deep fractures in religious, moral, and institutional life. The present text does not repeat that earlier analysis but extends it, revisiting questions of authority, embodiment, and liturgy in light of recent developments surrounding Canterbury. It is offered as a second step in an ongoing attempt to read contemporary ecclesial transformations within a longer historical and spiritual horizon.
When Dame Sarah Mullally, former Chief Nursing Officer of England and Bishop of London, was appointed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, it marked an unprecedented moment in the history of the Church of England. A nurse, a mother of two, a woman formed not by monastic withdrawal or aristocratic lineage but by the physical care of the sick, now takes her place in St Augustine’s Chair – the oldest ecclesial office in Britain and the symbolic heart of Anglican Christianity.
At her installation as Bishop of London in 2018, she told the congregation at St Paul’s:
“Let me reassure you, I do not come carrying bombs – or perhaps not literal ones, anyway. But I am aware that, as the first woman Bishop of London, I am necessarily subversive, and it’s a necessity I intend to embrace.”
Yet it revealed something deeper: her very presence within the hierarchy carries a quiet theological disruption. She embodies a form of authority that grows from flesh – from care, vulnerability, and the slow, demanding work of healing.
A Hapax in Christian History
Her appointment is, in a sense, a hapax – a singular occurrence. Not only the first woman to occupy Canterbury, but a nurse, a wife, and a mother arriving at the altar without the classical path of clerical formation. She brings not an ideology of gender, but what might be called a liturgy of flesh – where body, compassion, and authority converge.
For centuries, priesthood has been expressed through male metaphors: sacrifice, headship, spiritual fatherhood. Yet in her person, something of the older biblical rhythm returns – the vocation of woman as keeper of cycles, of birth and delay, of impurity and purification, of waiting and renewal.
One cannot avoid hearing here the echo of niddah / נִדָּה, of machzor / מחזור, of time itself as embodied holiness—where blood and waiting become the liturgy of covenant and mercy.
Between Healing and Accountability
Her years in the National Health Service formed her within a culture of responsibility under pressure. As Chief Nursing Officer at thirty-seven, she faced institutional failure and moral exhaustion within over-bureaucratized systems. In a recent reflection, she spoke of looking “into the heart of the Church of England” and finding “incoherent governance structures.”
With a nurse’s clarity, she added: “Without accountability and process, the people who are Christ’s body on earth free-fall into voids.”
This language – process, accountability, care – may sound managerial, yet in her voice it becomes ethical. The Church she inherits is wounded: by scandals, mistrust, and fragmentation. Her task is not to save a system, but to tend a body that bleeds.
The tragedy of Fr Alan Griffin, who took his own life after false safeguarding accusations, remains a shadow. Her public acknowledgment – “I know that, at times, I have failed”—is not defensive, but penitent. It may be her strongest form of authority.
Installation: Law Before Liturgy
What became visible during the installation itself, however, adds another layer – one that quietly reframes the entire event.
Before the liturgical celebration in the cathedral, a rather formal “installation” took place in a markedly juridical setting. Representatives of national, civic, and religious bodies gathered in what resembled a parliamentary or institutional chamber. Documents were signed, authority recognized, roles affirmed.
This should not be misunderstood. It belongs to a long Western tradition – British, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Latin – in which faith is historically intertwined with law, rights, and public recognition. The Church in these cultures has often grown alongside systems of legal legitimacy.
And yet, what remained striking was the absence: no prayer, no invocation, no placing of the act under divine witness. It was not law itself that surprised, but its apparent autonomy – as though lex civitatis momentarily stood without being received into lex orandi.
Even small gestures became charged with meaning. The Bible, held awkwardly, even inverted for a moment, appeared almost as a sign – one hesitates to overinterpret – yet in times of fragility, gestures speak. The Word was present, yet not entirely oriented.
A brief protest broke the surface. It, too, belongs to the same atmosphere: a world in which unity is no longer assumed, and visibility replaces consensus.
A Liturgical Palimpsest
Within the cathedral, the register shifted – but did not entirely resolve the tension.
The presence of a cross reminiscent of Constantinopolitan usage, associated with Bartholomew I of Constantinople, and gestures recalling Old Believer forms of blessing, introduced an unexpected layering of traditions. The participation of Roman Catholic figures, including the ecumenical cardinal Kurt Koch, further deepened this sense of convergence. Brand new: the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster Richard Moth read a text during the installation service. Incidentally, he was made, in 2017, a Canon of Honour of the Anglican Chichester Cathedral.
What emerged was less a unified rite than a kind of liturgical palimpsest – where histories overlap, and gestures carry meanings beyond intention.
Between Wig and Flesh
Another element, more visible and more immediate, is significant in this generation, a word largely pronounced during the celebration.
The presence of numerous women bishops, priests, and deacons, bearing highly individualized styles – colored hair, piercings, tattoos, expressive forms of dress – gave the assembly a distinctly contemporary tone. For those formed in more traditional ecclesial environments, this can appear surprising, somehow disorienting.
In earlier Western forms, appearance was also constructed – powdered wigs, formal vesture, codified presentation – but these pointed, however artificially, to an order received rather than self-fashioned. They stood at a distance from lived reality, much as the Jewish sheytl belongs to another logic altogether, one of modesty and law.
What appears today belongs to another register: the clerical figure no longer marked by separation, but by proximity. Identity becomes visible, personal, embodied.
The question remains open: does this proximity deepen the Church’s voice – or does it risk dissolving the signs through which the Church once spoke differently?
All this unfolds within a fractured communion. Movements such as GAFCON have effectively distanced themselves from Canterbury. The Anglican world is no longer a unified body, but a field of tensions – ecclesial, theological, cultural.
“Muddled,” “messy” – such words have been used. They are not dismissive; they are diagnostic.
The timing itself carries weight. The proximity to the commemoration of the massacre of the Jews of York in 1190 casts a long, silent shadow. There, religious identity, social pressure, and political structures converged toward some feeling of destruction.
This is not a parallel, but a memory. History does not disappear; it remains beneath gestures.
Seen from Jerusalem, where prayer still rises in many tongues, this Anglican moment resonates with developments within Judaism itself. Women increasingly assume visible roles – as teachers, judges, spiritual guides – not abolishing difference, but embodying it anew: ezer kenegdo / עזר כנגדו – women confront and assist men and give them some insights. It is not evident. It is well explained in the scriptural roots…
Here too, the feminine returns as liturgy.
Elisabeth Behr-Sigel spoke of the feminine dimension of priesthood – the capacity to bear the other. Annie Jaubert discerned in biblical time the rhythm of incarnation.
Both point to the same intuition: that liturgy begins in mercy—rachamim / רחמים—from rechem / רחם, the womb.
A Church that forgets this risks becoming a structure without flesh.
Toward a Fragile Beginning
Canterbury’s new archbishop will face resistance from all sides. Yet beneath the tensions lies something older: the rediscovery of flesh as revelation.
When Sarah Mullally distributes Communion, she does so with hands that have tended wounds. Her gesture carries the precision of care, the knowledge of fragile bodies.
In one interview, she confessed: “Sometimes I wonder why people receive from me at all.” It is a vulnerable sentence – perhaps the Church’s own confession. And yet grace insists.
Not as triumph, but as service. Not as ideology, but as flesh. Not as structure alone – but as care.
In a time torn between abstraction and excess, she has been installed on the feast of the Annunciation, linked to birthing of Jesus of Nazareth in Bethlehem. Her presence may whisper an older truth: redemption is not an escape from the body, but its transfiguration.
Nota: this article completes my first paper on the subject published in my blog on October 8, 2025: “https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/canterbury-when-womanhood-is-liturgy/”