This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Habent papam! They have a Pope — and congratulations to the Roman Catholic Church for the speedy election of a new head of their church, done with great solemnity and drama. As an Anglican, perhaps the greatest cause of envy is the speed. Barely three weeks passed between the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV.
Not so for us. Justin Welby offered his surprise resignation in November, went into retirement in January and we won’t hear anything until September at the earliest. Will we know the name of the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury by the one-year anniversary of Archbishop Welby’s resignation? Who knows? The Church of England decided not to move forward the scheduled meetings of the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) by so much as an hour.
The last regime handed the church over wholesale to the middle managers, and we are learning that the one thing they cannot do is manage. In this the church reflects the society it seeks to serve.
So let’s take a look at what has gone wrong. Why has the entire process been put on slow mode? Well, there is the official excuse and the unofficial excuse. The official excuse is that the dates were in the diary before the previous Archbishop retired, and it was just too complex to ask everyone to change their diaries. I shall not dignify that excuse with a response.
The unofficial one is that there has been so much monkeying around with the membership of the CNC that (at the time of writing) we still don’t know who’s on it. The way it has been played with is also indicative of Britain’s humiliating decline.
The first major change was Welby wanting to add five members from around the Anglican Communion, one each from Europe, Africa, America, Asia and Oceania. These have now been chosen, but nobody will say how.
There is a rumour that they were handpicked by Welby himself at the last meeting of an otherwise pointless talking shop called the Anglican Consultative Council, but nothing official has been released.
The British state loves its consultations and so does the church
To confuse matters, Welby insisted that General Synod added a criterion to their appointment: that three out of the five must be “Global Majority Heritage”.
This is a relatively new term, often used to replace terms like BAME. It is not uncontroversial, not least because it lumps together as part of a “global majority” Black Africans, British citizens of Pakistani heritage, South Sea Islanders, Uighurs and members of the Chinese Communist Party.
In short it means “not white”, although, as they have failed to provide a formal definition, it opens all sorts of questions about whether, for example, an Hispanic chosen to represent the Americas would or wouldn’t be included in the term.
Or would the new Pope, had his life taken a different path and he ended up an Episcopalian, been included or not? His maternal grandparents, after all, were Creole and were registered as black in the 1900 census. How many grandparents are needed to count as GMH?
This insistence on judging people by their ethnicity also flows from the absurd principle that I am better represented, for example, by fellow tubby, white, Oxbridge-educated, male Richard Burgon than by Kemi Badenoch. It is absurd in the church and it’s absurd in the state, but how many institutions have swallowed this thesis?
We have got ourselves into a similar mess about women. General Synod was persuaded to accept sex quotas for the CNC in February — that one each of the clergy and laity representing a diocese must be a woman.
What nobody mentioned in the debate (until after the motion was passed) was that, as Canterbury only sends one clergyperson to the CNC, that means the clergy can only be represented by a woman. It has apparently taken Canterbury three attempts at an election to get the process right.
And then it was decided to have a Potemkin consultation process. In a delicious irony it was on the same day that the cardinals voted for Pope Leo (day two of the process) that the Church of England announced with great pride that it had finished a consultation with 11,000 people about whom to appoint to Canterbury, including over 1,000 schoolchildren (most of whom were not, in fact, Anglican).
But the British state loves its consultations and so does the church. Think of the time spent managing the consultations and then producing a powerpoint and then making key stakeholders endure hours of presentations on it.
On the back of this the Commission will produce a “Role Profile” and “Person Specification”, as if we were recruiting for a middle management role in a bank. And then the people on the Commission will go in and make the decision they were going to make anyway (maybe, just maybe, guided by the Holy Ghost).
If this sounds depressing, that’s because it is. But ironically it gives me hope. The whole thing is such a joke and has been shown to be such by the Catholic Church’s speed and drama, that maybe we will burn the whole process to the ground and start again — maybe putting prayer (and speed) back at its core.
