Our cheers were for Archbishop Sarah, but also for our peers who minister despite excommunication and patriarchal stupidity.
Movements have moments. The installation of Sarah Elisabeth Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury, on the Feast of the Annunciation 2026, was one such moment for women’s equality in religion. Several millennia after Mary allegedly agreed to be the mother of Jesus, an oncology nurse turned Anglican priest (later, Archbishop of London) became the first woman to sit in the Chair of Augustine, to be the “first among equals,” the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion worldwide. Chaucer never envisioned it.
The Roman Catholic Women’s Ordination Conference hosted a Zoom Watch Party, which I attended. The contrast between Anglican progress on and Roman Catholic rejection of women’s ministry made it a bittersweet occasion.
During the ceremony, we celebrated one stained glass ceiling broken into smithereens. We wept as millions of women living and dead were vindicated in our efforts to claim full humanity, the right to leadership in previously guarded sanctuaries. Our cheers were for Archbishop Sarah, but also for our peers and ourselves who minister despite excommunication (for ordained Roman Catholic Women Priests) and patriarchal stupidity.
For all the joy of the day, there’s much to consider as the Anglican Communion, made up of 40+ autonomous churches with 100+ million members, finds its postcolonial way. It’s not coincidental that a woman is now in a position that may well end up being reunderstood, even abolished. Discussions of this kind have been underway for some time, of course, but Mullally’s installation may accelerate the process.
The Anglican communion is growing rapidly in Africa and Asia where women are active participants. Having a woman in leadership isn’t new there, as the strong presence of African women clergy at the Canterbury event proved. Still, opponents of women’s ordination abound in Anglican circles.
A central postcolonial challenge is why the Archbishop of Canterbury is still the spiritual leader of the church, why England remains the center of the Anglican universe. Why not an African bishop, for example? These questions will be discussed in the next six years of Archbishop Mullally’s term. Even in a moment of celebration, the dynamics of colonialism require careful, respectful attention lest women, however inadvertently, reinforce and reinscribe them.
Anglican women in England were ordained to the priesthood in 1994 and to the episcopacy there in 2015. So the relatively quick rise of Archbishop Mullally to be primus inter pares, from being ordained as a priest in 2002 and consecrated as a bishop in 2015, is in itself remarkable. Finding a common or at least tolerable way forward will require the mediating ways of a skillful leader. I wish her luck.
Anglican women are relatively new to clerical status in a church founded in the 16th century. Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first Anglican woman priest, was ordained in 1944 in China. The ordaining bishop wasn’t a proponent of women’s ordination. He was a pastor with integrity committed to providing sacraments for Anglicans in Macau where there were no ordained men. The Rev. Florence, ordained a deacon in 1941, had been ministering sacramentally there, so it made perfect pastoral sense to make her a priest.
In 1974, 11 Episcopal women deacons in the United States were ordained validly, if illicitly, as priests. Reactions were decidedly mixed. Some people, like Roman Catholic women expecting to be ordained soon, were thrilled. But one deacon reported that six months before becoming a priest she assisted at a service at Riverside Church in New York City: “During the communion, a priest to whom I was serving wine scratched my hand and told me to burn in hell.” It was not safe or easy.
Nonetheless, the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in 1976 voted to ordain women priests and bishops, and the floodgates opened. The early ordinands had their situations “regularized,” and future cohorts were made up of increasingly higher percentages of women. A diaconal ordination I attended recently had six candidates, all women. U.S. priest Barbara C. Harris was the first female Anglican bishop ordained in 1989.
For Roman Catholic women, the installation (also called the enthronement) of Sarah Mullally provided a familiar lesson in barriers overcome. She began her theological studies at age 40, married and with children, after a career in nursing and midwifery, the youngest person ever to be England’s Chief Nursing Officer. She did her theological training from 1998-2001 while still working as a nurse, studying in a local program. Sarah Mullally left nursing for fulltime church service in 2004.
This is a far cry from the preparation of many of her predecessors—bishops, and heads of communions, most of whom have had Oxford or Cambridge pedigrees, though not necessarily much experience outside the theological world.
Many Roman Catholic women can relate. Since we cannot be ordained validly and licitly, we’ve constructed our own roads to ministry. Contrast the broad experience of many women who run hospitals, teach kindergarten and lead universities, work in law and medicine, tend food pantries, and raise families, with the backgrounds of most newly minted Catholic male seminarians. Many such men have had hothouse theological preparation in seminaries. They’re taught (and obliged) to avoid committed relationships and not to have children. They are rewarded for their willingness to follow orders from on high, to keep silent in the face of wrongdoing. Such training shows in the quality of ministry in Catholic circles and it’s a factor in the clergy sexual abuse epidemic. Still, Catholic women aren’t even allowed to preach in many dioceses lest they speak openly from and about their well-rounded lives. Pilgrimage was the theme of Archbishop Mullally’s installation. While her immediate predecessor chose the same theme, his pilgrimage consisted of a ceremonial walk from the entrance of the church to the Quire (Choir) where the enthronement took place. Her pilgrimage was a six-day walk from London to Canterbury, a distance of about 87 miles, which she covered at an enviable clip. She stopped along the way to visit, pray, and eat with people, especially children. She mentioned in her installation homily that her feet (indeed her whole body) hurt, but she seemed none the worse for the wear. She gave new meaning to the old line about dancer Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did—but in high heels and backwards.
While Catholic women celebrated, Pope Leo XIV sent perfunctory congratulations to Archbishop Mullally. Instead of politely saving theo-politics for another day, he defensively underscored the obvious: “At the same time, we also know that the ecumenical journey has not always been smooth. Despite much progress, our immediate predecessors, Pope Francis and Archbishop Justin Welby, acknowledged frankly that ‘new circumstances have presented new disagreements among us.’” It hardly bears noting, but if reform in any arena required the absence of disagreement, the Church would probably still be keeping slaves.
The installation of the new spiritual leader of one of Catholicism’s closest sister communions is surely a “new circumstance.” As such, it’s a perfect opportunity to drop the disagreements and get on with the common work of peace and justice. Otherwise, Leo and his bishop colleagues should hang their heads in shame until their mitres fall off. They refuse to open the very sacraments they value for themselves to everyone, and for the good of the world. They could have a moment too.
Author:
Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., is a feminist theologian who is co-founder and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual ( WATER) in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. A Roman Catholic active in the women-church movement, she lectures and writes on theology and ethics with particular attention to liberation issues.
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