For Archbishop of Canterbury, leading the Anglican Church is a ‘high-wire act’

When the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, welcomed friends to sing Christmas carols at his London residence last week, his comments, as so often, related to his coronation of King Charles III in May.

The vaulted room in which his guests were gathered, he told them, had been used for four months to rehearse the ceremony twice a week. Members of his staff were assigned to play Charles and other members of the royal family in a rotating cast. “I always played the archbishop,” he said dryly.

He then went over the script a few times with the actual king. “We practiced setting it up and screwing it down,” Archbishop Welby later said of the 17th-century St. Edward’s Crown. “It’s a wonky old thing.”

But on the day of the coronation, before a silent gathering of 2,300 people and a worldwide television audience of hundreds of millions, the archbishop made a glaring mistake: He bent down after placing the crown to inspect whether it was level on the head of the sovereign sat, an unwritten move. making him look vaguely like a carpenter inspecting his work. “I got it right,” he recalled. “I just didn’t trust myself.”

Such level-headedness is typical of Justin Portal Welby, a well-groomed, affable 67-year-old preacher who carries the trappings of his onerous post – the Archbishop of Canterbury also serves as the Primate of All England and spiritual leader of 85 million people. Anglicans all over the world – with an almost gossamer lightness. Due to the looser formality of the Church of England, he is known as Mr. Welby, but his assistants simply call him Justin.

It is not that the archbishop is not of high standing. He took to his iPad to share a quote from mid-century American theologian and lawyer William Stringfellow, about the “moral power of death” triumphing over earthly realms (translation: “don’t fool yourself said Mr Welby.) But he also cheerfully noted that he drives a seven-year-old Volkswagen Golf and admitted to having received a speeding ticket.

After a decade as archbishop, and with two years to go before he must retire, Mr Welby relished his encounter with royal history. It was the culmination of a hectic year in which he also made waves by condemning the British government’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda as ‘morally unacceptable’. As a peer in the House of Lords, he sought to amend an earlier version of the legislation so that it would take a longer-term view on the problems of human trafficking and mass migration.

But he is well aware of the limits of what he can achieve before handing over power to the next archbishop in 2026. A bitter, years-long debate over how the Church of England should treat same-sex marriage will not be resolved during his term, he says. said in an interview at Lambeth Palace, his 14th-century residence in London.

Like the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Francis, the Church of England recently began allowing priests to bless same-sex couples. But discussions continue about more formal recognition of these unions. Conservative clergy in Britain sent a letter to the church’s ruling House of Bishops objecting to the blessings, while 10 Anglican archbishops from Africa and Latin America rejected Mr Welby as their leader – technically he functions as a first among equals – due to similar objections. .

Mr Welby has tried to follow a middle path. “Every person matters equally,” he said, “including LGBTQIA+ people.” Still, he emphasized that the debate over their unions cannot be forced. The dispute has been personally painful: Some of his oldest friends in the church have spoken out against his tentative steps toward recognition, while reformers complain that he is wavering.

“It is a perilous act for the Church of England because there is deep division and disagreement,” Mr Welby said. “We must treat this as a family dispute and not as a political dispute. In other words, don’t split.”

“Everyone probably feels at this point that I’m going both too fast and too slow,” he acknowledged. “That’s life.”

It’s a phrase the archbishop used more than once, and it suggests an equanimity honed over a life of fateful twists and turns.

Born in London to a mother who worked as Winston Churchill’s personal secretary and a quirky, mysterious father who ran two unsuccessful campaigns for Parliament, Mr Welby has described his childhood as “messy”. His parents, both alcoholics, divorced when he was three. His father later became engaged to actress Vanessa Redgrave.

In 2016, Mr Welby discovered through a DNA test that his biological father was not Gavin Welby, but Sir Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s private secretary, with whom his mother, Jane Williams, dated before her first marriage. Mr Welby’s mother, who gave up drinking years ago, died last summer at the age of 93.

Educated at Eton College, the training ground of princes and prime ministers, Mr Welby has said he first felt a religious calling while studying at Cambridge University. He began attending Holy Trinity Brompton, a prominent evangelical Anglican congregation in Kensington.

“He found God in a classic Protestant evangelical experience,” says Charles Moore, former editor of The Daily Telegraph, who was a year behind the future Archbishop of Eton. “It gives you a sense of urgency.”

But Mr Welby first embarked on a career more typical of his elite lineage, as finance director at French oil company Elf Aquitaine.

Mr Welby lived in Paris with his wife Caroline and gained a reputation as an astute reader of the markets. He became treasurer of a British firm, Enterprise Oil, and traveled to negotiate oil exploration deals. But the sense of a higher calling never left him, and in 1989 he resigned to join the priesthood.

His rise in the church hierarchy was even faster than his rise in the oil industry. After serving as canon of Coventry Cathedral and Dean of Liverpool, he was ordained Bishop of Durham in 2011. Just a year later he was appointed to succeed Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury, the 105th holder of a post whose roots date back. back to 597.

The switch from oil to holy oil was less unlikely than it seems, Mr Welby said. Both are built on the principle of taking big risks for even bigger rewards. “It’s an industry where you drill 10 to 20 wells for every time you actually find something other than water, and pretty sandy water at that,” he said.

The risk in the priesthood, Mr. Welby said, is that people will reject the Gospel of Jesus. (He declined to compare his success rate as a preacher with that of an oil prospector, saying the judgment should be left to posterity.) Still, he said his years in business had given him a sense of the inescapable creep of the secular society – or, as he put it, ‘a really deep-seated recognition of how irrelevant the church is to a lot of people in this country.’

Mr Welby has no magic bullet, but he highlighted the work of parishes in the trenches – the “coal face” of the church, he called them – to “reach those who are not often so easy to embrace.” ”

Attendance at Sunday services fell between 20 and 25 percent during the corona pandemic and has still not recovered. The number of candidates for the priesthood fell by 14 percent last year, even though the church has ordained women for almost three decades and allowed them to become bishops in 2014. This latest change, made by Mr Welby in the face of deep-seated opposition, is probably his most consequential legacy.

But that kind of boldness has also gotten him into trouble at times, especially when running a centuries-old, highly decentralized institution like the Anglican Church. “He kind of shoots from the hip,” said Mr. Moore, the fellow Etonian.

Cabinet ministers curbed his criticism of their immigration policies. While the archbishop did not dispute that Britain should resist uncontrolled migration, he said the country needs a more strategic policy. Putting asylum seekers on single flights to Rwanda, Mr Welby said, was below par for a country with Britain’s human rights tradition, even as he expressed doubt that planes would ever take off.

“Frankly, it’s a symbolic gesture,” he said of the revised bill, which was recently submitted by the House of Commons to the House of Lords for consideration. “This is essentially a performative bill.”

For all his interest in the legislative process, the Archbishop is still a devoted servant of the monarchy. He is furious at criticism of one of his innovations for the coronation: a voluntary oath of obeisance to the king, sworn by the public, at home and in Westminster Abbey. Critics called it patronizing, but he said it was a democratizing gesture, as at previous coronations only the hereditary aristocracy had sworn allegiance.

“There’s not a guard standing behind you in every household in the country with a fixed bayonet,” he said. “It does not matter. Just relax.”

Mr Welby brushed aside another report intended to illustrate his close ties to the royal family: that Charles had once enlisted him to try to broker a deal with his estranged son, Prince Harry, so that the Duke of Sussex could attend the coronation could attend.

“I don’t believe in my own ability to reconcile at all,” he said. “I have a deep faith in God’s power of reconciliation.”