When Sarah Mullally was
formally installed in a historic ceremony at Canterbury Cathedral on March 25,
2026, a former nurse became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Her vocational
background highlights the importance of healing, which was appropriate because
her predecessor, Justin Welby, had stepped down because he had failed to
address a serial sexual-abuse scandal. It had been important most of all to the
victims—boys at a church camp who were sexually molested by a gay man
volunteering at the camp—that Welby go. Close to the day of the ceremony, Mullally
promised explicitly to attend to such victims, as is fitting and proper for a
Christian cleric to do. It is what Jesus Christ would do, whereas he would not recognize
the sexual predators or their enablers in the hierarchies of Christian denominations.
The contrast itself bears witness to just how far some denominations had fallen
from being justified in claiming to follow the principles preached by Jesus in
the Gospels. That those sects had been able to do so even while representing
themselves as distinctly Christian institutions shows just how power clerics
have in beguiling laity.
The full essay is at "Sexual Abuse in Churches."
