The Church of England claims that Sarah Mullally is the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury.
At first sight, the Catholic objection to this numbering — which insists that she is in fact only the 36th Protestant archbishop, following the 69 Catholic Archbishops of Canterbury from St Augustine to Cardinal Reginald Pole — might look like little more than historical pedantry, or a reflexively angry protest against a Protestant revisionist account that functions as state propaganda rather than accurate history.
In fact, the difference between these two ways of counting exposes the deepest structural and spiritual weakness of the Church of England. This is not simply a Catholic criticism wounded by the expulsion of the Western Church from this island and the persecution that followed it, but also an attempt to explain the protest that erupted at Sarah Mullally’s election service in St Paul’s Cathedral.
The initial argument runs like this. The Church of England numbers its archbishops from Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 597, yet it formally repudiated papal authority at the Reformation.
There were therefore only sixty-nine Archbishops of Canterbury in communion with Rome, ending with Cardinal Reginald Pole.
Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the English Reformation, therefore becomes the seventieth — the first of a new Protestant succession.
Theological Rupture, Not Administrative Continuity
The changes ran very deep. The nature of Christian ministry was radically changed. The nature of the Mass was repudiated and replaced. The sacrificing priesthood became a preaching presbytership. Bishops became managers rather than successors to the apostles, since the succession had been both broken and repudiated. The Church became an uneasy balance between congregational autonomy and managerial episcopacy.
The understanding of who the clergy were and what they were for changed radically. The offices of minister, bishop, and archbishop became something so different that it was not merely the repudiation of papal allegiance that broke continuity, but an irreparable fracture in theological coherence.
By continuing to use Augustinian numbering, Anglicanism maintains a fictive claim to historical continuity while simultaneously denying the sacramental and magisterial authority that alone gave that continuity its meaning. This is not a harmless inconsistency; it is an inherent contradiction — and contradictions have consequences.
The result is an office rich in inherited prestige, which explains why continuity is so fiercely claimed, but increasingly thin and fragile in its capacity to exercise any binding authority.
The crisis the Church of England now faces is, at root, a crisis of authority. Where does authority lie? Who possesses it? Who recognises it? How is it practised?
The Anglican answers collapse into political pragmatism — a pragmatism that now appears to have failed. When pressure is applied — when questions are asked about safeguarding, episcopal competence, or justice for victims — it becomes clear that there is no authority to which appeal can reliably be made. The Anglican conscience has nowhere authoritative to turn.
It is this absence of real authority that produced the protest at the election service in St Paul’s Cathedral. The objection was not merely eccentric or personal; it was political and philosophical. It was a protest conducted in a vacuum created by the absence of any binding magisterium capable of adjudicating questions of doctrine, moral responsibility, episcopal competence, or justice.
In Catholicism such protests are intelligible because there exists an authority to which appeal may be made — even if that authority is resisted, criticised, or at times misused. By contrast, the Church of England possesses no teaching office capable of commanding widespread assent, settling disputes, or issuing rulings that require obedience rather than negotiation.
The Church of England is therefore a political institution that lacks a founding philosophy. More seriously still, it lacks any agreed metaphysic. It was constructed out of an unstable coalition between sacramentally nostalgic High Anglicanism and pragmatic, pugnacious Puritanism.
What this produces in the office of Archbishop of Canterbury is an office that claims inherited dignity but possesses diminishing moral coherence, intellectual consistency, and inadequate — or non-existent — authority. When authority collapses into managerial process and leadership becomes purely symbolic, dissent has nowhere to go except into public protest.
The absence of a Protestant magisterium, created by the unbridgeable rupture of the Reformation, has generated a crisis of doctrinal clarity and spiritual authority that has now broken the surface — in a way for which the Church of England has no obvious remedy.
What the Protest at St Paul’s Really Signified
The lone heckler protesting against the appointment of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury may have appeared to be an isolated, rude interruption by an eccentric protester. In fact, it was far more significant than that and needs to be taken seriously — both in terms of what the protest was directed at, and what it represents.
The protester was an eccentric retired Anglican clergyman called Paul Williamson, who has protested before against what he perceives to be the imposition of a feminist agenda that illegitimately changes the nature of the Church of England.
Although he was one lone voice and was quickly removed from the premises, his views are far more widely shared than is immediately apparent. Many Anglicans who once held them have since become Roman Catholic, concluding that the Church they had inherited was essentially Catholic in vision, and that the political battle to save the Church of England from progressive ideological capture — feminism in particular — had been lost.
But Paul Williamson was not only protesting against ideological capture. He was also protesting against institutional corruption arising from failures to deal adequately with safeguarding issues involving clerical sexual abuse.
This was not simply a protest against ideas, but against a system that appeared incapable of accountability.
He was protesting against an institutional arrogance that now runs the Church of England — an arrogance that appears to have decided it could proceed with its latest protégé for the Archbishopric of Canterbury without practising any real accountability, either to victims of sexual abuse or to those who believe the Church should transparently follow its own procedures with honesty and integrity.
Safeguarding, Competence, and Survivor N
Let us look first at the criticism of Sarah Mullally’s competence.
A man publicly identified only as Survivor N claims that he was sexually abused by a priest in the Diocese of London, for which Sarah Mullally was responsible. The allegations included groping, sexualised comments, and requests that he perform a sexual act.
Survivor N claims that when he made a formal complaint under the Church’s disciplinary system — the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) — the handling of the complaint was deeply flawed and misleading.
He claims that Mullally forwarded his confidential emails to the priest he was accusing, constituting a fundamental breach of safeguarding protocol. He further claims that she publicly stated the case had been fully dealt with, although the complaint was never properly concluded, communicated, or resolved in any way that involved him.
As a consequence, he argues that the Church’s incompetent and corrupt response compounded his deteriorating mental health. He subsequently lodged a further complaint against Mullally herself under the same disciplinary process.
This complaint was investigated by the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, and dismissed — as is the case with the overwhelming majority of CDMs brought against bishops, who now constitute the Church’s managerial class. Survivor N has stated that he intends to continue appealing against that dismissal.
Institutionally, the Church of England has since acknowledged that the complaint against Mullally was not properly handled and that the matter is now being revisited by what it describes as “appropriate authorities”.
A Double Standard After Welby
The obvious difficulty is that Archbishop Justin Welby was forced to resign for a very similar failure to deal properly with a safeguarding complaint. It is therefore extraordinary that the Church of England chose to proceed with the appointment of a bishop whose own competence, transparency, and integrity are clouded by unresolved safeguarding failures.
Once again, it looks like institutional self-protection — first shielding predatory clergy, and then defending incompetent managerial bishops who appear to prioritise institutional reputation over pastoral care, and over the fundamental requirement that justice must not only be done but be seen to be done.
Not One Voice, But Many
Paul Williamson’s heckling was not an isolated protest. His objections were shared not only by Survivor N, but also by other representatives of survivors of clerical sexual abuse — including a public critic known as Gilo.
More broadly still, resistance to the feminisation of the Church is shared by the overwhelming majority of Anglicans worldwide. Roughly 85 per cent of the estimated 85 million Anglicans globally are represented by GAFCON and allied provinces. They have repeatedly protested against the way the Church of England’s appointments process privileges a narrow liberal-progressive ideology.
The capture of Christianity by feminism — itself a manifestation of neo-Marxist egalitarianism — has produced a deepening and seemingly irreparable schism within global Anglicanism. The appointments process increasingly resembles a broader cultural takeover of Christianity within English, American, and Western Anglican life.
Institutional Capture and Cultural Collapse
The disparity between the vast numbers of Anglicans in the global South who protest against what Mullally’s appointment represents, and the pretence that the Church of England’s internal processes embody democratic accountability, gravely damages episcopal credibility.
The tragedy of the protest at St Paul’s Cathedral is that it was not a disruptive voice for its own sake, but a lament against institutional abuse of power. This has emerged in two forms.
The cover up of sexual abuse and the managerial incompetence or corruption that caused it; and the repudiation of the political deal struck to allow the Church of England to maintain the width of contradictory views after the experiment with the ordination of women. Inevitably once they had gained institutional power, they sought to repudiate the agreement.