The new Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman, and this has caused a crisis in the Anglican Communion. Joe explains the possible outcomes.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and 17 people making up the Crown nominations commission for the Church of England might have made a decision that is going to result in an enormous global schism within the Anglican communion. Perhaps as soon as next year.

CLIP:

For the first time in nearly 500 years of history, the Church of England has nominated a woman to lead it. Dame Sarah Mulally, the Bishop of London. She’s been in that position already breaking glass ceilings through her career.

Joe:

But the issue isn’t just that the new Archbishop of Canterbury is breaking glass ceilings, but also breaking perhaps the model of church leadership laid out in the Bible. And more than that, she’s also someone who is openly pro-choice, which marks a first in this regard as well, and in general breaks from certainly historic Christianity as well as the not too distant Anglican past. And her views are while seemingly fairly straightforward for an English member of the Church of England, not in lockstep with the views of those in what’s called the global south places like Sub-Saharan Africa. And so immediately upon hearing the news that this woman, they don’t recognize as a bishop in the first place has been named the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church of Nigeria announced that they don’t recognize her authority and therefore they’re declaring spiritual independence from the Church of England.

Now, there’s a little bit of history that you have to know for why this matters. So a couple things. First, you might say, well, why does it matter if Nigeria is part of the Church of England or not? Well, in terms of official members, and even more so when it comes to active membership, Anglicans in Sub-Saharan Africa make up a huge portion, perhaps a majority, perhaps even a large majority of practicing Anglicans around the world. And this story about the Church of Nigeria is actually part of a much broader story of what’s called Gafcon. Now, this is part of the Global Anglican Futures Conference, which originally met in 2008 to try to bring the Anglican communion back on track when they saw things going in a much more liberal direction that they’ve saw is out of line with biblical Christianity. And so they greeted this news recently by just saying that today’s appointment makes it clear than ever before that Canterbury has relinquished its authority to lead.

So if you’re not familiar, historically, the Archbishop of Canterbury has held a primacy of some kind within Anglicanism. It’s not the same role that say the Pope plays, but it is an important role of trying to keep the communion together. And so here you have Gafcon representing a huge number of Anglicans worldwide saying we no longer believe that Canterbury fulfills that role, and they mentioned they met originally in 2008. It’s worth quoting from that 2008 statement because it’s quite bold in what it says. At the time, there were liberal American diocese and Canadian diocese of the Episcopal church that were pushing for things like same-sex unions and same-sex marriage and the ordination of people living in non celibate homosexual lifestyles. And so they denounced this first as the proclamation of a different gospel, which is contrary to the apostolic gospel is saying that they no longer believed in Jesus as the author of salvation from Send Death and Judgment.

Many of them were treating all religions as equally valid and that they were claiming that God’s blessing for same-sex unions, they were endorsing that over and against the biblical teaching on holy matrimony. So after denouncing this as a false gospel, one that they say culminates in the consecration of a bishop living in a homosexual relationship, I believe that’s Gene Robinson, they then declared that they were simply no longer going to be in communion with people doing this. So it was an act of beginning to break communion. So this created an odd situation where you had members who were in communion with the Church of England, but they weren’t in member with other bodies that were also in communion with the Church of England. And so you had what was even back in 2008, quite clearly moving in the direction of perhaps an eventual schism. One of the issues here isn’t just that people were behaving in this way where they treated Christianity like just one option among many or didn’t uphold sexual morality or even were openly violating sexual morality.

It was also that the Anglican communion writ large wasn’t following its own teachings because as recently as 1998, the Church of England at the what’s called the Lambeth Conference passed resolution one 10, which rejected homosexual practices incompatible with scripture and said that they cannot advise the legitimizing or blessing of same-sex unions nor ordaining those involved in same-sex unions. But right away Anglicans around the world and particularly the global north places like the US, Canada and the United Kingdom ignored this enacted completely contrary to this with no penalty, with no apparent consequence. And so the more traditional Anglicans in the global south we’re quite annoyed by this, and I’m speaking very broadly of course, and speaking of the global north and south, you’ll find, and we’ll get to this in a minute, things like the Anglican Church of North America, which is trying to be in harmony with gafcon with the more conservative bishops in places like Sub-Saharan Africa.

Going back to the Gafcon statement though from October of 2025, today’s appointment makes it clearer than ever before that Canterbury has relinquished its authority to lead. So in the context of what we just talked about, that’s quite remarkable that they’re already moving in the direction of what looks like a schism, and now they say the reset of our beloved communion is now uniquely in the hands of gafcon and we are ready to take the lead. Now in most contexts, this would be viewed as a usurpation or at least a kind of declaration of independence or a declaration of war. These are strong kind of claims. We don’t trust the people who are currently in leadership. And so we’re going to call together a global summit of Orthodox Anglican bishops to Nigeria to meet from the third to the 6th of March in 2026, and they say, this may be the most significant gathering of faithful Anglican since 2008.

I would go further and say this could have more long lasting implications than the mere creation of Gafcon because again, by gaff con’s, own estimates, which sure they might be biased, but they estimate that in terms of church going Anglicans, 85% of Anglicans actually in the pews belong to a gafcon province. That you have plenty of people on the books in places like Europe and the US and Canada, but they don’t really go to church. But when it comes to actual church going attendance, and frankly even when it comes to a lot of the official membership, the global south is really pulling its weight. So this is a big schism brewing and I wanted to approach it from several different ways. The first is particularly for those I know most people watching this are not Anglican, this is a Catholic channel. I’m not Anglican. So it might be helpful to get a little bit of a primer of just why is the Anglican communion set up in such a way that it is so easy to go into schism? And there’s two things you need to know. The first is that the Anglican Church, as it’s sometimes called, isn’t really a church by any definition. I would suggest it’s rather a confederation of different bodies, bodies around the world that are more or less free to be in communion with one another or to leave whenever they want.

CLIP:

So today, Anglicanism certainly includes the Church of England, but it also includes the Church of Nigeria, the Anglican Church of Kenya, church of the Province of Uganda, Anglican Church of Australia, the Episcopal church in the United States, the Church of South India and many others. These different churches are denominations in some sense. Each has at least one primate presiding bishop or archbishop at the top that is not subordinate to any other bishop. However, there is also a sense in which they could be considered the same denomination to some extent too. This is the meaning behind what is called the Anglican communion. A denomination or church body that belongs to the Anglican communion is in communion with all the other denominations in the communion and historically churches that claim Anglicanism have been part of this Anglican communion.

Joe:

That’s from the channel ready to harvest, by the way, which does a great breakdown for about 15 minutes of this whole situation while being so neutral. I have no idea where the guy ends up on the subject. He just lays out all the facts. I intend to offer some opinion on this, but it’s helpful to just understand what is going on, first of all, and he’s right to say that there’s one sense in which this looks like one big denomination and another sense in which it looks like a bunch of different denominations. It’s hard to know whether we should treat these different things as one thing or not, but add to this that there’s additionally been movements away from this Anglican communion precisely because of issues like this. So the first moves happened back in the 1970s.

CLIP:

Historically, churches that claim anglicanism have been part of this Anglican communion, but there already are some exceptions due to certain Anglican denominations introducing the ordination of women in the 1970s, some bishops, ministers and congregations broke away claiming to be the continuation of true anglicanism. These churches such as the Anglican Catholic Church are called Continuing Anglicans.

Joe:

So yeah, the Continuing Anglicans from 1970s, they were upset about the ordination of women and what was called the affirmation of St. Louis at what was called the Congress of St. Louis in 1977 declared that the people doing this, which was the Anglican Church of Canada and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the US by doing this unlawful practice of women’s ordination, had simply departed from the one holy Catholic and apostolic church. They had ceased to be part of the church because they were inventing new holy orders that weren’t part of actual Christian structure. That’s a big move. Of course, it’s a big claim today. Many of the continuing Anglicans are now members of the Catholic church through what’s called the Anglican ordinary. That’s not true of all of them, though they kind of had a split within themselves as to whether they wanted to remain Protestant or become Catholic, but they were united in rejecting women’s ordination as being a viable Christian practice. So that was in the seventies. Then you flash forward 20 years or so, and the fight now is on homosexuality and endorsing those living in open homosexual lifestyle.

CLIP:

Additionally, more recently, churches left the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church in the United States to form a denomination, the Anglican Church in North America, which is also not part of the Anglican communion. The reason for this division is mainly because these North American Anglican church bodies that the A CNA split from, we’re allowing non celibate gay and lesbian clergy and have come to perform same sex marriages.

Joe:

If you’ve watched some of my recent videos, you might’ve heard of the Anglican Church North America because Dr. Matthew Barrett, who is a pretty well-known Baptist scholar, when he became Anglican, that’s the body he became part of, and this is probably with some interesting unique views. Their issue, as you heard, wasn’t on women’s ordination. Their issue is on sexual morality. Can you live a homosexual lifestyle and still be a practicing priest, bishop, et cetera in the church’s good graces or not? It really gets to the heart of the question of what is the Christian teaching on sexual morality on women’s ordination? They’re a lot murkier. So in 2017, the England Church of North America issued a statement that is pretty heavily caveated, I would say. They said they were trying to first acknowledge that there are different principles of ecclesiology and hermeneutics that are acceptable to Anglicanism that may lead to divergent conclusions regarding women’s ordination to the priesthood.

So you have their not show us that they disagree about women’s ordination amongst themselves among the A CNA, not just among Anglicans broadly, but also they have different principles of ecclesiology and hermeneutics. So there are underlying differences that are giving rise to those obvious differences. However, they say they do acknowledge that this practice of women’s ordination is a recent innovation to apostolic tradition and Catholic order. So I mean, sure, it’s kind of undeniable. We agree that there is insufficient scriptural warrant to accept women’s ordination to the priesthood as standard practice throughout the province. Now, that’s a strange place to come down because you think, well, if there’s not sufficient scriptural warrant to justify this being a widespread practice, how is there scriptural warrant for it to be a practice? It isn’t like in the Bible like 5% of priests or women. So if the argument is this is a baseless practice and an innovation that breaks from tradition seems like the answer should be, so we don’t do it at all, but they say, so we’re not going to do it a lot.

We’re not going to make it standard practice. So they already have a however there they’re going to then have another. However, we continue to acknowledge that individual diocese have constitutional authority toward ordained women to the priesthood. So even though it appears to be unbiblical, even though it appears to be a break from tradition, they’re able to do that if they want to. However, they did stand strong on the fact that women will not be consecrated as bishops in the Anglican church in North America. Now, notably, they don’t say they cannot be. They say they will not be. And given the recent history of the Anglican Church of making and breaking promises on sexual morality, perhaps the AC NA will fare better. But again, it wasn’t long ago that the Lambeth Conference and the Anglican communion writ large were saying, oh yeah, we’re not going to do anything like bless same sex marriages or anything.

And you clearly see where the shift has happened in a very short time. So all of this leaves the Anglican Church North America in a very strange kind of spot right now, a narrow majority of their diocese. I don’t ordain women to the priesthood, however, the biggest diocese do ordain. So actually most North American anglicans live in diocese that women to the priesthood but don’t allow it for the Episcopal, which again raises this question of like what’s the logical theological biblical coherence behind any of this? Women can be ordained as priests but not as bishops and sometimes not. What are we doing here? So all has to say there are these different offshoots within Anglicanism, and so not everyone is going to be affected by a new Archbishop of Canterbury in the same way. So we already have the beginnings of these little schisms and I think we have another enormous schism brewing.

What will happen, God only knows. But I think the question that should be asked if Anglicanism can be saved is this more underlying question of what does it mean to be Anglican in the first place? And I would suggest there are several different things you could mean by it. On the literal level, the word Anglican comes from the same route as Anglo-Saxon or England itself. It just means the place of the angles. That’s what England means. In this case, it’s the church of the S, it’s the Anglican church. And so you could say, I’m English and I go to church, and so any church I go to is an English church. You could do that or you could say, I’m going to remain Anglican because I’m English and I believe the king of England should have authority over the church. That is historically one of the features that made Anglicanism a distinct denomination.

But today, as you saw from that map, most Anglicans aren’t actually under the King’s authority anymore. And so a lot of the reasons for the Church of England coming into existence as a separate denomination are actually outdated, meaning the reason you have all these different places outside of England calling themselves Anglican, despite not being English is of course because of British colonialism. And so maybe if you just are obsessed with England, if you’re just a huge Anglo file, you might call yourself Anglican, but if you’re not English, then you obviously aren’t going to just do the, well, I’m English and therefore the king is in charge of the church as a rationale. That rationale I don’t think is very widespread even among English Anglicans anymore. It certainly doesn’t seem that way, purely anecdotally, and it doesn’t make much sense if you’re not be like me saying, well, I’ve got to join the Bulgarian Orthodox Church because I’m Bulgarian.

I’m not. I’m not Bulgarian. So that’s the first reason I think we can safely kind of put that one to the side, at least for the vast majority of us. The second reason someone might say that they are Anglican is because they want to remain in communion with the mother church. In fact, when the Church of Nigeria announced that it was breaking away from the Church of England, some of the people in the comments on Twitter pushed back saying things like, how can you profess to know more than those who brought you Christianity or saying declaring spiritual independence from your founding fathers is wild. In other words, we should be faithful to the people who gave us Christianity. And so even if you aren’t part of England, you’re part of somewhere that was colonized by the British, you’re indebted to them bringing Christianity to your shores, and so you want to remain in communion with the people who brought you Christianity.

There’s a logic to that. I can respect that completely. The problem is if you take that as a principle, then you should ask, well, who brought Christianity to England’s shores? And the answer to that is quite clear. St. Gregory the Great sent St. Augustine of Canterbury, his personal friend, and we have even the correspondence as he’s establishing the Catholic church in England. So St. Augustine of Canterbury writes back and says, since series, but one faith, why are the uses of the churches so different? One use of mass being observed in the Roman Church, another of the churches of Gall, that’s France. And Pope Gregory responds by telling him the Roman mass, the use of the Roman church because that’s what you’ve been nurtured in, because he was actually previously before he was sent to England, he’d been on a monastery literally on the Pope’s personal property, his family’s property.

He was a monk, he was of Rome. He wasn’t just Roman in the sense of being part of the Catholic church. He was literally Roman and the Pope gave him permission to select carefully anything that he found that’d be more pleasing to Almighty God, whether in the Roman church or the French church or in any church, whatever, and introducing it to the Church of the Anglia, the Anglican Church, which is as yet new in the faith by a special institution, what you have been able to collect from many churches. In other words, the Pope gives special permission for the creation of a distinctively English expression of the one Catholic church. But very clearly, this is all in communion with the Pope. This is all clearly at the Pope’s direct verbatim getting orders from the Pope kind of command. We don’t have to, sometimes we go back in history and say, oh, St.

Patrick appears to have been Catholic, and Baptist will say, no, he’s really a Baptist, and Orthodox will say he’s really Orthodox. In this case, it’s so obvious because he’s writing to the Pope and the two of them are friends and he’s on a mission that Gregory himself wanted to go on, but Gregory became Pope so and so, yeah, this passion for bringing Christianity to England, the reason Anglicanism exists, if we just mean English Christianity, is because of the Pope very explicitly, very directly. So if it is a form of spiritual patris side for Nigeria to reject the faith of England, what would certainly be spiritual patris side for England to reject the faith of Rome. But that’s exactly what happens. Flash forward to Henry vii. This is a thousand years almost after that correspondence you just heard between Gregory and Augustine. And in 1534 Henry viii, the English king declares himself to be the only supreme head on earth of the church of England.

Now, historically, that’s completely baseless. When Augustine arrives on the shores of England, the kings are all pagan. They don’t establish the church. The Catholic church establishes the church on a papal mission, on a papal mandate. So in other words, all I’m saying is if you want to be Anglican in that sense because you want to respect your kind of spiritual tradition and communion, you don’t want to commit this kind of spiritual patris side. You want to respect the people who gave you Christianity. I would urge you to just follow that to its logical limit and respect the Christianity that was given to them, that your true earthly head isn’t the king of England. It’s naturally Pope Leo the successor to Pope Gregory. Now, this gets even more complicated if you take the idea that the king of England should be able to decide all of this for whatever reason, I would suggest there’s even a sort of contradiction here.

I’ll just make this point briefly and move on because as I say, in 1534, king Henry vii has parliament named him the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, but 20 years later, his daughter married the first has that repudiated and restores England, a full communion with the church. They make absolution. They’re openly contrite for the sins of her father. And so if the whole Anglican claim is we really buy this idea that the king of England should have authority over the church, then surely the Queen of England, when she is restoring the church to communion with the Catholic church, you’d have to say, well, logically we’d have to be Catholic under those conditions. Now, that hasn’t happened since then because four years later after Mary was imprisoned, her sister Elizabeth is declared the supreme governor of the Church of England. And so there’s this very strange thing really at the heart of Protestant Anglicanism where you have in this instance rejecting the authority of Queen Mary because you believe so passionately in the idea that the queen is the head of the Church of England and she’s telling you she’s not.

It’s a strange situation. Again, it’s a little bit akin to Rastafarians who claim that Haley Sala is God and Haley Sala is like, I’m Ethiopian Orthodox. I’m not even a Rastafarian.

But there’s a third way. I know some people hearing this are going to say, I am not Anglican because of some incidental history about the British monarchy. I’m Anglican because I believe in the teachings of the Anglican confessions, namely the 39 articles. And so I think the clearest articulation of this is actually from that 2008 statement from Gafcon that I quoted earlier, because they insisted, even though they were obviously doing something that was going to create a schism, they insisted they weren’t really breaking away from the Anglican communion because to them, the doctrinal foundation of Anglicanism is what defines their core identity as Anglicans. In other words, by sta... Read more on Catholic.com