New Installation, Same Old Problems

Not so long ago, the installation of the new Archbishop of Canterbury was primarily an English affair, heaving with Church of England bishops and a smattering of representatives from the wider Anglican Communion in attendance.It is only in modern times that planners have tried to make the event resemble something like the British Commonwealth at prayer.That might have worked some magic in the late 20 th century, but by casting this event as a grand international affair, the pomp and ceremony now have more than an air of out-of-date imperial hubris.This is the Church of England trying to create the impression and aura of being a premium-brand global Catholic church, anointing its new leader.Substantial sums of money have been poured into the event to ensure it conveys the appearance of some grand international celebration of global-ecclesial diversity, centred on Canterbury-led pre-eminence.The polity is projected to the wider world as a more palatable hybrid of meek and languid Protestant reforms with understated Catholic aesthetic accents and that innate English fondness for temperate mildness.Yet this installation masked far deeper problems for the Anglican Communion.Whilst many have welcomed Dame Sarah Mullally's appointment, it is, of course, already a sign of continuing divisions across the Anglican Communion that some quietly opted to skip the ecclesiastical jamboree.Some openly declared their rejection of a female Archbishop of Canterbury, whilst others cited their reasons for boycotting the event as opposition to the theological positions Mullaly allegedly holds.Other archbishops from overseas stayed away, not so much in protest as because the status theatre of the occasion no longer resonated.So, despite the planned grandeur of the Arch-episcopal installation, it struggled to gain purchase, let alone win widespread approval across the Communion.To paraphrase T. S. Eliot ('The Hollow Men', 1925), this indicates the beginning of something marked by less of a bang and more of a whimper.The imperial hubris that shaped the occasion may be partly to blame.Those planning the installation seem to have colluded in the serious fiction that the scale of global Anglicanism is vast.For many years, the Church of England has touted the global number of Anglicans at around 88 million members, making it the third