Sarah Mullally named as new Archbishop of Canterbury

Dame Sarah Mullally has been named as the new Archbishop of Canterbury designate, the first woman to be chosen for the role. The 63-year-old chief nurse, who became a priest in 2006, was elected as the first female Bishop of London in 2018 - the third most senior member of the Church of England. It's the first time in almost 500 years that the Church has nominated a woman to lead it. Horrific violence of Thursday's deadly attack on a synagogue in Manchester, according to her first public address on Friday, "hatred and bigotry cannot tear us apart.

The Church has been without someone in the top job for almost a year after Justin Welby resigned due to a safeguarding fiasco. He resigned after a damning report revealed that he was converted into a prolific child molester associated with the Church. According to the report, he could and should have reported John Smyth's sexual abuse of boys and young men to police in 2013. In an interim role, Archbishop Stephen Cottrell assumed most of Mr Welby's duties and was one of the body's voting members in selecting his replacement. He has been asked to resign from his role in an assault lawsuit. Women were first ordained priests in the Church in 1994, but the first female bishop elections took place 20 years later in 2014. In keeping with tradition, the process of selecting a new archbishop begins with a name being given to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and then to the monarch.

Sir Keir has congratulated the appointment of Dame Sarah, saying,

I wish her every success and look forward to working together.

While technically the King is the head of the Church of England, the person in charge of Archbishop of Canterbury is the most senior bishop and is the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion.

She is of utmost importance in the United Kingdom and around the global Anglican Communion,

Buckingham Palace said. The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, a conservative group, has sluggishly criticized the appointment, saying that although some will embrace it,

the overwhelming majority of the AngliCan Communion maintains that the Bible does not require a male-only Shedoes will not serve in her new position until the election is confirmed in January, and an enthronement service will take place later this month, after they have paid their respect to the King.

In an age that seeks certainty and tribalism,

she said in a speech to Canterbury Cathedral on Friday,

Anglicanism has something quieter but stronger.

We are witnessing hatred that rises amid fractures in our societies,

she said of the horrific violence of Thursday's attack on a synagogue in Manchester.

We then have a responsibility as a Church to be a people who stand with the Jewish faith against antisemitism in all its various forms,

she said. Hatred and bigotry of any kind are not allowed to tear us apart.

She married with two children and spent more than 35 years in the NHS, becoming England's youngest-ever chief nursing officer in 1999. Despite being volunteered in the Church at the time, it was just a few years later that she decided to become a priest and was quickly assigned to help make changes in the way the church dealt with abuse. She became canon treasurer at Salisbury Cathedral in 2012 before becoming Bishop of Crediton in the diocese of Exeter in 2015. As Bishop of London, she was seen as someone who could use her work as an NHS administrator to help the diocese modernize the siocese.

I have worked as the government's chief nursing officer, as the chief nursing officers' chief nursing executive, and also a diocese that is very diverse in London, and I've heard her as a nurse leading complex organizations. So far, I'm set for some of these things, but I'll admit that I can't do it alone. I'll have to do it with other coworkers.

I discovered that

being the first woman is significant, and I often go to schools, and especially the young women,

Dame Sarah said, "although they don't want to be the Bishop of London or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Perhaps the most pressing topic in her tray is still to map a safer route into dealing with violence and treating those affected by it with greater compassion. A decline in church attendance has also occurred, but London has to some extent bucked that trend. As has her predecessor, one of the areas she has been most vocal about it is assisted death - she is a vocal critic as well as her predecessor. When laws were passed in the Commons, she characterized it as

unworkable and insecure, posing a danger to the most vulnerable people in our society. One of her responsibilities as Bishop of London was to chair a commission aiming to influence the Church's decision on whether or not to honor same-sex marriages. The decision to officially allow priests to bless same-sex couples in 2023, according to Sherrow,

a moment of hope for the Church. Rowan Williams, a former archbishop, outlined her new role as requiring a newspaper in one hand and a Bible in the other.The anticipation of having an opinion on anything is very high," Dr Williams told the BBC.