Sandy Curnow Reflection

Dialogue between Churches

Recently the Pope and the King of England prayed together in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Amongst the gifts they exchanged, Pope Leo named the King Royal Confrater (brother) with his own chair marked with the Royal Crest in St Paul’s Basilica in Rome, while the King named Leo Royal Confrater in the Royal Chapel of St George’s Chapel, Windsor. What a  joy it was, after 500 years of separation to see the two Christian traditions growing closer. Calling each other ‘brother’.

Several weeks before that, the Rt Revd and Rt Hon. Dame Sarah Mullally, Bishop of London was appointed as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury; she will be the first woman to hold that office. Cardinal Kurt Koch, President of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, sent her his congratulations, and expressed the Catholic Church’s support for her new ministry. 

He wrote: “to congratulate you on your appointment and to express the good wishes of the Catholic Church to you as you prepare to undertake this important service in your Church. I pray that the Lord will bless you with the gifts you need for the very demanding ministry to which you have now been called, equipping you to be an instrument of communion and unity for the faithful among whom you will serve.” He spoke of longstanding theological dialogue between the Anglican Communion and the Catholic Church, noting that it has fostered mutual understanding and affection over nearly sixty years. “It is my fervent hope that such closeness may continue in the years ahead as we continue to walk together on the way. With the assurance of my prayers for you and your family,” he said.

Two points must be made: firstly how good it is to see these two strands of the Christian tradition growing closer, and secondly how impressive a figure the new Archbishop is. 

Images: Pope Francis greeting the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby; Archbishop elect Mullally (images from Vatican News website)

Sarah Mullally was born in 1962 in Surrey, England, and chose a career in nursing rather than medicine because she wanted to serve, as she said, the whole person. She trained first as a registered nurse and then completed her studies for a Master of Science in Health and Welfare. She worked as a nurse in various London hospitals training from the ground up to senior hospital administration, and at age 37 was appointed the youngest ever Chief Nursing Officer for the whole of the National Health in the UK. An extraordinary responsibility. She was made a Dame (a knighthood) in the 2005 Honours list for her services to health.

From 1998 she also studied part-time for the Anglican ministry and was ordained four years later. She left her position as Chief Nursing Officer, and immediately went to work full time as an assistant Curate in Battersea. Again she worked from the ground up. Almost immediately she was employed in various areas of the Anglican Church, including teaching Ethics. By 2015 she was consecrated Bishop, working in various English Dioceses and three years later was appointed Bishop of London (the third most senior Anglican Church appointment in the UK) and played a leading role in the Coronation. Seven years later she was elected 106th Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England. She is married with two children. Her list of academic achievements is all the more extraordinary as she is dyslexic. 

At 63, and a woman, she takes on a very heavy load. Her position is an ancient one; the first Archbishop of Canterbury was Saint Augustine sent to England by the great Pope Gregory (he of the mistaken Magdalene) to convert the Anglo Saxons. It was a tough job for they were vigorously pagan, but it was not the first time Christianity had been practised in Britain. Some Roman ruins indicate that Christianity was brought from the East with the Roman Legions posted to Britain under the emperors, and became established after it was legalised under Constantine, and which then lingered on in the various Celtic tribes that populated Britain.

Image:  First known depiction of the head of Christ, 4th Century Villa, Hinton St Mary (Fransars-own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24887683)

Saints Patrick and David – the patron saints of Ireland and Wales – come from this early British period, but then Christianity was effectively wiped out by the polytheism of the invading Anglo-Saxons, Germanic peoples from near the North Sea, who occupied England, and slowly spread westward. They had settled in most of England, and eradicated most traces of Christianity by around 800 CE. Only on the farther reaches of Cornwall, the oratory of St Piran, the patron saint of Cornwall – and of Tin Miners – and now mostly hidden by sand, is the oldest still remaining Christian site in Britain. (I include this because my name is the Cornish word for Cornwall, and when a grandson chose St Piran as his patron for confirmation the late Archbishop Little – to whom the saint was unknown – was still chuckling at the end of the ceremony.) 

Little trace of earlier beliefs or language survived the strength of the Anglo-Saxon culture; much of modern English is based on their language; think even of our days of the week named for their gods – Tyr, Woden, Thor, Freya – Tuesday to Friday. Converting them to Christianity was no mean task. Saint Augustine arrived in 597 and worked from the south from Canterbury, while Christian missionaries from Ireland settled first in the Scottish island of Iona, and then built in the north the great monastery on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in 634 which spread its Christianising  influence across Northumbria. 

Lindisfarne showing the scriptorium fireplace to warm the monks as they wrote the great Lindisfarne Gospels between 698-721. (Personal image)

The illustrated manuscript is one of the world’s greatest books. (Personal image)

Some Irish traditions of worship differed from Roman ones, and the differences were settled in favour of the latter at the Council of Whitby in 664; the English church reached a degree of unanimity. The previous Archbishop of Canterbury had just died, victim of a plague sweeping Europe; his ultimate replacement was St Theodore of Tarsus who was sent from as far as  Constantinople to organise and unite the Christian churches. It is said that he learnt to speak English on the journey north. Aged 66 when he arrived, he vigorously re-organised all of the churches on Roman lines for the next 28 years, dying aged 88 in the year 690.

When the Normans conquered Britain in 1066, King William replaced almost all the Anglo-Saxon bishops and abbots, especially including Canterbury, with Normans; he realised how powerful church practice was in order to legitimise his new rule. Norman French became the language of the Court and much of the law, and Latin the language of church but Anglo Saxon lived on in the voices of the ordinary people, to re-emerge triumphantly three centuries later as Middle English – the language of that marvellously humorous critic of churchmen’s flaws in the pilgrims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which takes us neatly back to Canterbury itself.

The great Archbishop Lanfranc had replaced the last Anglo-Saxon Archbishop Stigand as 35th (?) incumbent at Canterbury; he was a trusted advisor of the king William the Conqueror, but first and foremost he defended the independence of the Church from Royal interference. We find it difficult in Australia today to understand quite how powerful and how tempting it is to have the Church allied with State politics. Kings love compliant bishops. All of which leads to the best known Archbishop of Canterbury of them all: the anything-but-compliant, martyred St Thomas a Becket. Again, it was a struggle between the authority of Church and State in England. King Henry II wanted churchmen holding minor roles to be tried for criminal matters in secular courts, while Becket argued that they should be tried by the Church. It was just one more area of conflict between the two men, but the principle was seen by both as a test between the authority of church and Rome, and the power of the Crown and England, and caused the famously short-tempered king to say, fatally, ”Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”  

Four of his knights took him at his word, rode to Canterbury and slaughtered the Archbishop in his own Cathedral on Dec 29th, 1170. He was canonised almost immediately, and the site became an internationally famous place of pilgrimage . 

The role of Archbishop of Canterbury has not always been so onerous, but throughout history it has been in various ways a challenging one. It is this that Archbishop Mullally inherits today.

By Sandy Curnow