Sarah Mullally was installed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury at a ceremony in Canterbury Cathedral on Wednesday, becoming the first woman in more than 1,400 years of institutional history to lead the Church of England and assume the role of spiritual figurehead to approximately 85 million Anglicans across the world.
The 90-minute ceremony began with Mullally knocking three times on the cathedral’s west door before being welcomed inside by local schoolchildren. She then took her seat on the 13th-century Chair of St. Augustine before an congregation of around 2,000, among them Prince William and Princess Kate, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and religious leaders representing multiple traditions and continents. Prayers and readings were delivered in several languages, including Urdu, while an African choir of women led part of the procession in song and dance.
Mullally, born on March 26, 1962, formally became Archbishop of Canterbury on January 28, when her election was legally confirmed at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Wednesday’s enthronement marked the start of her public-facing ministry in the role. The occasion coincided with the Feast of the Annunciation, which the service took as its principal theological theme.
In her sermon, Mullally drew on her personal history to frame the moment. “As I look back over my life, at the teenage Sarah, who put her faith in God and made a commitment to follow Jesus, I could never have imagined the future that lay ahead,” she told the congregation. Opening her ministry from the ancient chair, she said: “As I begin my ministry today as Archbishop of Canterbury, I say again to God: ‘Here I am.'”
She called for peace in regions afflicted by armed conflict, naming the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan, and Myanmar. She also addressed, directly, the institutional failures that preceded her appointment, acknowledging the suffering caused by the Church’s past safeguarding shortcomings and committing to remain “committed to truth, compassion, justice and action.” It was a reference to a crisis that led her predecessor, Justin Welby, to resign in November 2024 after he was found to have mishandled a long-running sexual abuse scandal within the Church.
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Before her ordination as a priest in 2001, Mullally served as the government’s Chief Nursing Officer for England, the youngest person ever appointed to that position, at the age of 37, having previously specialized as a cancer nurse. Symbols of that earlier career were woven into the ceremony: the cope she wore at the cathedral door was fastened with a clasp modeled on the belt she wore as a National Health Service nurse. She also wore a ring given to a predecessor, Archbishop Michael Ramsey, by Pope Paul VI in 1966, an artifact of the gradual rapprochement between Anglican and Catholic institutions that followed the English church’s break from Rome under King Henry VIII in the 1530s.
Bishop Rachel Treweek, who was consecrated alongside Mullally in 2015 among the Church of England’s first cohort of women bishops, described Wednesday as significant in ways that had not been widely anticipated. “It’s a huge moment for the Church,” she told Reuters. “I don’t think any of us thought we’d have a female Archbishop this quickly.”
The enthronement comes against a backdrop of unresolved tensions within the global Anglican Communion over the ordination of women and the blessing of same-sex unions. The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, known as Gafcon, a conservative grouping drawing largely from churches in Africa and Asia, expressed strong opposition when Mullally’s appointment was announced in October. However, the bloc this month stepped back from earlier plans to install a rival figurehead, establishing a new council instead. A separate representative body within the Communion also dropped a proposal for a rotating presidency, amid concerns that it would set up a competing authority to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
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Some within the traditionalist bloc attended Wednesday’s ceremony. Bishop Francis Omondi of the Anglican Church in Kenya, which is aligned with Gafcon, told Reuters his community opposed the Church of England’s position on same-sex blessings but intended to argue that position from within rather than from outside the Communion. Archbishop Stephen Cottrell of York, the second most senior bishop in the Church of England, acknowledged the difficulty the occasion presented for some parts of the global Communion while describing the wider mood as celebratory. “I think the world is rejoicing today at what’s happening,” he told NPR.
Mullally’s path to Canterbury ran through senior nursing, parish ministry, and two previous episcopal appointments, as Bishop of Crediton and then as the first woman to serve as Bishop of London, a role she assumed in 2018. The Church of England ordained its first female priests in 1994 and consecrated its first female bishop in 2015. The position of Archbishop of Canterbury, however, traces its origins to 597, when Pope Gregory I dispatched Saint Augustine to Britain, making Wednesday’s installation a departure of a different institutional magnitude.
Mullally will now assume a full program of public duties, including as Diocesan Bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury, Primate of All England, and a lord spiritual in the House of Lords, where she was re-introduced in her new capacity in February.