This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
Whilst alert to the possibility that this Margaret Thatcher quote could get you cancelled for all sorts of modern reasons, I open with it in order to discuss something far older — in fact the oldest office in continuous existence in the British state (apart, arguably, from the Crown): the Archbishopric of Canterbury.
The See of Canterbury was founded in 597 by St Augustine. Wonderfully, there are a few surviving objects from that early mission to the English: a massive stone cathedra in Canterbury Cathedral; the Gospels St Augustine brought with him, most recently used at the King’s Coronation; and an ivory crozier head, said to be from the episcopal staff of Pope Gregory the Great who sent Augustine to England.
I once was handcuffed to that relic when bringing it from Rome to Canterbury for a meeting of the Anglican Communion primates. In a gesture of ecumenical friendship, Pope Francis gave Archbishop Welby a modern remodelling of it during a service in 2016, marking 50 years of close ecumenical relations between the Anglican and Catholic churches.
It was that crozier which Justin Welby laid down on the altar at the service marking the end of his archiepiscopy on the Epiphany.
That little story tells a bigger story about the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury as it has changed over the last 1,400 years. Why was the Pope giving a very valuable — and symbolically even more valuable — gift to Mr Justin Welby? (Priestly and episcopal orders: “absolutely null and utterly void”, thank you, Pope Leo XIII)?
Because he was the primus inter pares, the “First amongst equals” of the bishops of the Anglican Communion. He is, in the exhausting technical language of church bureaucrats, an “Instrument of Communion” — one of four — and his see is the one other churches have to be in communion with in order to be considered a member of the Anglican Communion.
St Augustine’s crozier head speaks of the antiquity and historical reality of the see which Justin Welby held
Why is this the case? Look at the crozier head. Why was this chosen as a gift? Because it spoke of the antiquity and historical reality of the see which Justin Welby held, a primatal see founded by a saint who was sent by another saint, the head of whose crozier (the symbol of his authority) we can still see today. Justin Welby’s power and authority came from something well beyond his capacity to explain it. “If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
Now, rather depressingly, we’re trying to explain it away. The Anglican Communion’s answer to the Inquisition is the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith, and Order or (take a deep breath) IASCUFO.
They have just brought out a paper calling for a remodelling of the whole Anglican Communion to remove the Archbishop of Canterbury from the decision-making structures of the church. Part of this is driven by those churches who object most strongly to developments in church teaching regarding sexuality.
But part also seems to be driven by the quondam Archbishop himself. He clearly became increasingly uncomfortable with the role, especially as his politics and theology developed in an increasingly “post-colonial” direction.
He named this explicitly in a speech to the Anglican Consultative Council in 2023, almost word-for-word calling his position and power “neo-colonial abuse”. He clearly thought this would win him friends and support in the Global South and was rather surprised when, at a meeting in Rome last year, the primates of the different churches of the Communion rejected his plans to surrender that part of his office. Instead they proposed ways the role might be expanded.
Despite this, in a model with which the Church of England has become quite familiar, the show rolled on, and the Anglican Inquisition’s report has proposed … exactly what the quondam Archbishop was proposing all along: a rotating or elected president who could represent the Communion internationally and have the authority to convene, invite, disinvite members of the Communion and so on.
I’m sure this plan will quicken the pulse of a certain type of English person beset by post-colonial guilt (though I’m old enough to remember how three years that didn’t count for much when it was thought essential that five members of the Anglican Communion were part of the commission to select a new Archbishop of Canterbury, but there we are). It will also excite those around the Communion wishing to punish the liberal West.
But it won’t hold because it has no romance. It has no history. Nobody will offer a reworking of an ancient crozier head for someone on a rota. This “president” carries no intrinsic authority and will inevitably have to tell people, increasingly aggressively, to respect their authority. And we know that won’t work because “being powerful is like being a lady … ”
