The Church of England’s Christmas looks anything but peaceful

LONDON (RNS) — Christmas, a holiday promising peace, is turning out to be a tumultuous period for the Church of England as sexual abuse scandals threaten to derail the archbishop of York, the senior cleric charged with leading the church after the Nov. 11 resignation of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Since then, George Carey, who held Welby’s seat from 1991 to 2002, has also agreed to no longer officiate as a priest after being accused of failing to deal with a priest accused of abuse, in the same case that has also led to demands for the resignation of  Stephen Cottrell, the archbishop of York.

The combined scandals have given momentum to those calling for the the church to give up some of its influence in the worldwide Anglican Communion and for its bishops to no longer hold seats in the House of Lords as the so-called Lords Spiritual.

These latest crises come as the formal announcement was made by the Privy Council, a body of advisers to the British king, that the king had accepted Welby’s resignation and therefore had effectively declared “the Archbishopric of Canterbury vacant with effect from the seventh day of January 2025.”

Work is now underway for the search for Welby’s successor, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer announcing that Jonathan Evans, a former head of security service MI5, will chair the Crown Nominations Commission, the body charged with nominating the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

Welby stepped down after the release of a damning report of an investigation into a known child abuser, John Smyth, who ran camps associated with the Church of England. The Makin report showed Welby had not followed up on whether the police, after being informed about Smyth in 2013, had appropriately resolved the situation. After calls for Welby’s resignation, he said that he “must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024.”

Cottrell, the second most senior cleric in the Church of England, was named in a BBC documentary about David Tudor, a priest who was banned from ministry for life in October. The filmmakers said that in 1988 Tudor was acquitted of indecently assaulting a 15-year-old, despite admitting to having sex with her when she was 16, the legal age for sex in the U.K., but was separately convicted of assaulting three girls. That conviction was quashed on technical grounds.

The next year, Tudor was banned from ministry for five years by a church tribunal for sexual misconduct. Returned to ministry in 1993, he was suspended again in 2005 on another complaint and banned from entering schools or being alone with a child.

Despite this restriction, he was appointed an area dean some months later with responsibility for 12 parishes. When Cottrell was appointed bishop of Chelmsford in 2010, he allowed Tudor to stay in that post, despite knowing of these restrictions, the BBC said, and renewed him in the role in 2013 and 2018.

After another police investigation in 2019, Tudor was suspended and a five-year inquiry, concluding two months ago, ended with his complete removal from ministry, after he admitted having sexually abused two girls.

Cottrell has pointed to Tudor’s 2019 suspension and eventual removal as the most he could do, saying that before then church regulations gave Cottrell no grounds to act — a situation he called “horrible and intolerable — most of all for the survivors.”

But Cottrell’s critics point to Tudor’s appointment as an honorary canon during Cottrell’s time, which Cottrell said was out of his control. The bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, the first to call for Welby’s resignation, described Cottrell’s response as “ludicrous.” 

Andrew Brown, a former religion correspondent for The Guardian, said Cottrell was in an extremely difficult position. “Since (Tudor) had twice been acquitted of the offenses that no one doubted he had committed,” Brown said, “he could not even be suspended until or unless fresh charges were brought against him. As soon as that happened, in 2018, Cottrell suspended him. He should not be blamed for failing to do what was legally impossible.”

However, Brown agrees that Cottrell should have blocked Tudor’s renewal as area dean and his being named honorary cathedral canon. The latter Brown called “a meaningless bauble, but one that looks meaningful to the outside world. Cottrell should have broken that link, but for reputational reasons, not because it would have made anyone safer at the time.”

The Tudor saga led to another fall from grace in the departure of Carey from officiating as a priest.

It was Carey, then Archbishop of Canterbury, who returned Tudor to ministry under supervision in 1993, and on Carey’s watch in 1996, Tudor’s name was removed from a list of disciplined clergy. Last week, now-Lord Carey, 89, announced he would no longer serve as a priest, surrendering his permission to officiate the sacraments after more than 60 years.

The scandals have bled into other issues about the church’s future. The Inter Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order has coincidentally just published a document questioning the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The so-called Nairobi-Cairo proposals, saying that “the leadership of the Communion should look like the Communion,” in effect question the Archbishop of Canterbury’s status as president of the Communion, which is now far stronger in the Global South than in England.

“Anglicans now recognize that fullness of communion with the Church of England or the See of Canterbury are not requisite for any church of the Communion,” said the report. “Rather, all together seek a highest degree of communion possible, one with another.”

It goes on to suggest that the Communion should acknowledge its “historic connection with the See of Canterbury” but that in a post-colonial era, the presidency should rotate among primates. 

Graham Tomlin, a Church of England bishop who chairs IASCUFO, tweeted last week: “It’s time the Church of England was no longer the centre of the Anglican Communion,” a view endorsed by the Rev. Giles Fraser, an influential Anglican broadcaster who said last week, “The Anglican Communion needs to stop being run from a small town in Kent.”

Although the Nairobi-Cairo proposals won’t be considered until 2026, their publication is bound to influence discussions about who might be appointed to replace Welby. At least two likely candidates — the current bishop of Chelmsford, the Rt. Rev. Guli Francis-Dehqani, and the bishop of London, the Rt. Rev. Sarah Mullally — are women, which might be controversial in some parts of the Communion.

In addition, during a recent second reading of the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill, which seeks to end the role of hereditary peers in Britain’s Parliament, there were calls for the abolition of bishops’ seats in the Lords as well.

Lord Birt, former director-general of the BBC, described the Lords Spiritual as “a feudal overhang” and said that in the 2022 Census of 56 million British subjects, “fewer than half declared themselves to be Christian. … more are Catholic than Anglican; and more people say that they do not believe in a God than do. We are a country of many faiths and of no faith. Our Established Church is not even a Church for the whole of the United Kingdom.”

In a reference to the abuse scandals, he said that “recent events have demonstrated powerfully and emphatically that the Church of England is losing moral authority.”

The Rt. Rev. Nick Baines, bishop of Leeds, said bishops had “no illusions about the need for changes. We are behind that, but we need to be wiser about the nature of what we are doing.” He also noted that the bishops still provide needed links between Britain’s communities. “Probably some of the best-connected people in this country are diocesan bishops who oversee and engage with the whole of civil society, at just about every level in the regions.”

The bishops’ place in the House of Lords reflects the status of the Church of England as the United Kingdom’s established church. Another reminder of that will come on Christmas Day, when its Supreme Governor, King Charles III, gives the monarch’s annual message to the nation via television and radio.