(RNS) — The resignation of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, on Tuesday (Nov. 12) came as a surprise to many in the Anglican Communion and its more than 85 million adherents in 165 countries, but hit hardest perhaps in the United Kingdom, where the king heads the Church of England and the Archbishop is its senior cleric.
While many Anglicans may find their faith challenged by the scandal that brought Welby down — his role in a “conspiracy of silence” to suppress the largest sexual abuse scandal to have hit the modern Church of England — they may take courage from the resilience of the archbishopric, which has its roots in the Middle Ages and has endured through centuries of turmoil.
In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine — not the northern African doctor of the church but an Italian monk — to Britannia to convert a people who had experienced waves of invasions by pagan peoples after the Romans retreated from the island.
Landing in Kent in 597, Augustine found a Celtic church that had no wish to accept outside interference. But after baptizing King Ethelbert, who ruled from Canterbury and held sway over neighboring tribes, Augustine established the authority of the pope and the Roman Church and is considered the first Archbishop of Canterbury.
Given the turbulence of the early Middle Ages, secular and religious leaders were dependent on one another to maintain the loyalty of subjects and the loyalty of believers. This should not suggest, however, that a king’s and archbishop’s goals were always in alignment. Until the Reformation in the 16th century, the Archbishop of Canterbury exercised his own power and influence, independent of the throne.
It was not uncommon for the Archbishop of Canterbury to be promoted from a smaller English bishopric, with formal election by the monks of Canterbury Cathedral and confirmation from the pope. Sometimes the pope tried to parachute in a foreign candidate to further his own political ends; sometimes the monarch tried to arrange the election of one of his political allies. These almost symbiotic relations could lead to turmoil — and murder.
Canterbury Cathedral in Canterbury, Kent, England. (Photo by Rafa Esteve/Wikimedia/Creative Commons)
When the archbishopric fell empty in 1162, King Henry II saw the chance to unite the highest secular and ecclesiastical offices in the person of his loyal friend and effective chancellor, Thomas Becket, who was ordained a priest, consecrated a bishop and became primate of England all on the same day.
But consecration changed Becket, who seems to have had a religious conversion. He resisted Henry’s attempts to extend royal power at the expense of the church. Their quarrel became so intense that Becket was seen as gratuitously aggressive, lost the support of the English clergy and fled into exile.
Henry may never have uttered the famous words supplied him by T.S. Eliot in the verse drama “Murder in the Cathedral” — “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest” — but the king did encourage Becket’s demise. The archbishop was cut to pieces at Canterbury’s high altar by four of Henry’s knights, precipitating a crisis and the king’s own excommunication, ultimate penance and reconciliation with Rome.
Relations with Henry’s heirs fared no better. In 1207, after a series of inappropriate elections were quashed by Pope Innocent III, he forced the monks of Canterbury to acquiesce to his choice of Stephen Langton. King John, however, rejected Langton, and the king’s machinations to resist Langton led to England being placed under interdict — from 1208-1213, the whole country was denied all church services, including marriages and baptisms.
More dire for the king was that the interdict dissolved the nobility’s oaths of loyalty, leading to unrest and ultimately revolt. It was this that led John to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede, establishing the roots of English liberty from arbitrary governance.
Thomas Cranmer portrait by Gerlach Flicke, 1545. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia/Creative Commons)
But perhaps the most influential Archbishop of Canterbury was Thomas Cranmer, a loyal supporter of Henry VIII’s break from the Roman Church and the principle of royal supremacy over church affairs that would help spur the Protestant Reformation. It was Cranmer, the author of Anglicanism’s Book of Common Prayer, who established much of the doctrinal and liturgical foundations that still echo in the Church of England.
Cranmer’s resolute contributions to creating a new English church nevertheless led to his own demise. After the accession of Queen Mary, the Catholic daughter of Catherine of Aragon, despite futile attempts to reconcile with the Catholic Church, Cranmer was burned at the stake in 1556. Just before he was executed, he withdrew his recantations of the English church and died a martyr to Anglicanism.
We consider ourselves too reasonable (and irreligious) today for such behavior, but the consequences of Welby’s resignation will be complex and, in many ways, politically significant.
Protocol and precedent require that the prime minister advise the British king on whom to appoint as the next archbishop, though the call actually falls on a committee that decides on behalf of the monarch. The Archbishop of Canterbury is a member of the House of Lords by virtue of the office. Traditionally, retired archbishops have been awarded life peerages to maintain their seats.
But what of an archbishop who retires in disgrace? There are no precedents. His living predecessors have retired to academic life, commenting occasionally on social matters. Rowan Williams, now Baron Williams of Oystermouth, who stepped down as archbishop in 2012, only retired from the House of Lords in 2020.
But Welby, who may be hesitant to voice his spiritual authority, could do worse than to imitate the retired Catholic popes, who, whatever reason for their resignations, saw wisdom in obscurity. The first to abdicate, Celestine V, in 1294, passed a decree allowing a pope to resign and spent the remainder of his life as a prisoner of his successor, the dubious Boniface VIII. Gregory XII, who voluntarily resigned in 1415 in order to end the Great Schism that was dividing the church, also lived out his life in rural Italy. Benedict XVI, who stepped down in 2013, spent his last days in a monastery, appearing in public infrequently until his death in 2022.
(Jacqueline Murray is University Professor Emerita in history at the University of Guelph in Ontario. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)