From The New York Times:
The Church of England announced on Friday that Sarah Mullally, the bishop of London, will become the 106th archbishop of Canterbury, making her the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide and the first woman to lead a church whose roots date back more than 1,400 years.
Bishop Mullally will succeed Justin Welby, who resigned from the post last November after the publication of a report that said he had failed to pursue a proper investigation into claims of widespread abuse of boys and young men decades ago at Christian summer camps.
A former cancer nurse who served as the chief nursing officer for England, Bishop Mullally, 63, is a vocal exponent of the rights of women in the Church of England. She has served as the first female bishop of London since 2018.
The appointment of a female archbishop was not a complete surprise; the short list of candidates had featured two other female bishops. But it will thrust the church into a new era, potentially sowing tensions within the far-flung Anglican Communion, parts of which are more conservative than the Church of England.
Read more (gift article)
Born in Woking in 1962, the Rt Revd and Rt Hon Dame Sarah Mullally DBE is one of four children, with two sisters and one brother. She attended Winston Churchill Comprehensive School and Woking Sixth Form College. She became a Christian at the age of 16.
Bishop Sarah was educated at South Bank Polytechnic and Heythrop College, University of London. Before being ordained, she worked as a nurse in the National Health Service, which she has described as “an opportunity to reflect the love of God”. She specialised as a cancer nurse and became a ward sister at Westminster Hospital, before being made Director of Nursing at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. In 1999, at the age of 37, she was appointed the Government’s Chief Nursing Officer for England in the Department of Health. She was the youngest person ever to be appointed to the post. Bishop Sarah was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2005 in recognition of her outstanding contribution to nursing…
…Bishop Sarah is married to Eamonn, an Irish-born IT and Enterprise Architect who enjoys beekeeping and volunteering as a London tourist guide. The couple have two grown-up children, Liam and Grace. She has continued her interest in the health service having been a non-executive director at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust then at Salisbury NHS Foundation Hospital. She is Chair of Christian Aid. She has spoken openly about her dyslexia, describing her difficulties with writing and reading. In her spare time, she loves cooking, walking and pottery.
Her Wikipedia page notes:
Mullally supports the Church of England’s current teaching on marriage; that is between one man and one woman for life.
Mullally has described her views on abortion as favoring abortion rights although she would lean against abortion faced with her own decision. She has said that “I would suspect that I would describe my approach to this issue as pro-choice rather than pro-life although if it were a continuum I would be somewhere along it moving towards pro-life when it relates to my choice and then enabling choice when it related to others.”
