Bishop Guli was a previous favourite to take on the role given to Sarah Mullally – something which she said made her “profoundly uncomfortable”.
“I don’t think I did anything to exacerbate that. If anything, I tried to keep my head down… I didn’t court any of the publicity,” she told The Times.
She likened the pressure of the top job to that of BBC Director General, in light of Tim Davie’s resignation.
“The level of expectation that we put on any individual is becoming inhumane,” Bishop Guli said. “We have an environment where there is no space for — I don’t want to say human error, but human judgment.”
“I think that anybody who was actively seeking that role or wanting it probably didn’t really have a full understanding of the impact.”
The Iranian-born Bishop came to England as a teenage refugee fleeing persecution. Her father was the Anglican Bishop of Iran, and had converted from Islam. The family faced death threats, and the murder of Guli’s brother during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Bishop Guli said she “understands” why former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, needed to resign over safeguarding, but warned against expecting the future spiritual leader of the Church to take the fall for every failing: “For those who are in any form of public life, [the pressure] can be catastrophic.”
Bishop Guli has also suggested that the Church of England must be prepared to take on a "smaller" role, being "less influential and more marginal," and warned it against setting "targets that “heap pressure on clergy and congregations to grow and increase in size”.