CANTERBURY – In a ceremony that has been taking place for more than 1,400 years, the Church of England has installed its new leader, the archbishop of Canterbury.
For the first time in history, the new archbishop is a woman, Sarah Mullally. She becomes the 106th person to hold the job.
The 90-minute ceremony began with Mullally knocking three times on the west door of Canterbury Cathedral, before being let in by local schoolchildren. It was attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
In her sermon, Mullally alluded to her role as the first female archbishop, saying: "As I look back over my life … I could never have imagined the future that lay ahead, and certainly not the ministry to which I am now called."
Mullally was appointed to the role last October. In the week before the installation, she walked 87 miles east from London to Canterbury, a journey immortalized in Geoffrey Chaucer's English literature classic, The Canterbury Tales.
This is a historic moment because the Church of England has only allowed women to become priests since 1994 and bishops since 2014.
As well as becoming the head of the Church of England, Mullally is the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion, which includes tens of millions of Anglicans around the world. The installation ceremony nodded to the role's global reach, with sections in languages, which included Spanish, Swahili and Urdu.
Mullally's appointment has not been without controversy: one of the church's offshoots, the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, has expressed its opposition.
However, Stephen Cottrell, the archbishop of York – the second most senior bishop in the Church of England – told NPR that the occasion marking Mullally's installation as the archbishop of Canterbury was a joyful one.
"I don't underestimate the challenge this is for some people in the Anglican Communion, but equally I don't think we should overplay that," Cottrell said.
"I think the world is rejoicing today at what's happening."
Reverend Emily Onyango, assistant bishop of the Diocese of Bondo, was the first woman ordained as a bishop in the Anglican Church of Kenya. She told NPR that leadership roles in the church can be harder for women.
"Most people have never seen a woman church leader … people set such a high bar," Onyango said. "Everybody thinks that you should be twice as good as the other bishops to be recognized so I think it is quite challenging."
Onyango was visiting the U.K. alongside fellow bishop, Vicentia Kgabe, the bishop of Pretoria. They are both members of what's known as the "Africa six." Five members of the group of female Anglican bishops traveled to Canterbury for the ceremony.
"Some of us never thought in our lifetime, nor in the life of the church, we'd have a woman being elected and her saying yes to the appointment," Kgabe said. "That is a historic moment."
"We are very excited and grateful to God that this has happened," Onyango added. "We feel affirmed, you know, by one of us being at the top of the church."
Leading up to the ceremony, the Church of England has been in something of a crisis. The last archbishop, Justin Welby resigned in disgrace in November 2024 after he was severely criticized over the way he handled a sexual abuse scandal in the church.
Madeleine Davies is a senior journalist for Church Times, who has met Mullally on several occasions. She told NPR Mullally's experience as a senior nurse and then as Britain's chief nursing officer, should help her in the job. "She always seems very calm, in control, self-contained," Davies said. "She's got quite a peaceable presence, and I think that will be reassuring to people."
Davies says that some people have criticized Mullally as "managerial," but suggests this is likely to be a useful character trait in her work. Mullally's tasks involve helping to clean up the church's image, tackling falling congregation numbers, and looking after hundreds of cash-strapped churches across the United Kingdom.
"This is not only a centuries-old office, it's a millennia-old office," the bishop of Winchester, Philip Mounstephen, told NPR, explaining that Mullally has become the leader of one of the world's oldest institutions. "The office of Archbishop of Canterbury is older than the Crown of England," Mounstephen said.
For nearly a thousand years, the Church of England was aligned with the Catholic Church, until King Henry VIII broke communion with Rome in order to get a divorce and marry Anne Boleyn. At earlier periods of history, the role used to involve giving political advice to the monarch. Several archbishops were killed over the years, notably Thomas Becket and Thomas Cranmer.
While today's archbishops of Canterbury are less influential than in the past, they do have a seat in Parliament's House of Lords, and often give moral leadership through statements to the media.
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