Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally poses for a photo outside St Paul’s Cathedral in central London on Jan. 28 following her confirmation service. Photo: Press Association/AP
[Episcopal News Service] Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally will visit The Episcopal Church Sept. 25-28, including stops in the dioceses of New York and Connecticut, and at the House of Bishops’ fall gathering at Camp Allen in Navasota, Texas.
While in New York, Mullally will also visit the United Nations, where she will meet with senior representatives and host a roundtable discussion on health and peace. On Sept. 27, Mullally will preach at Christ Church in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Mullally, who officially took office in January, has made a few trips outside the Church of England since her consecration in March. The first one was Rome, Italy, in April, where she preached during a choral Evensong at St. Paul’s Within the Walls, which is a part of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe. In her sermon, she addressed what the church is called to be in an increasingly polarized world. Mullally also visited the church’s Joel Nafuma Refugee Center.
During her stay in Rome, she also met and prayed with Pope Leo XIV at the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City in an act of “shared ecumenical commitment.”
While on a Holy Land pilgrimage last month, Mullally preached at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in the Palestinian Christian town of Birzeit in the West Bank. She also met with Layan Nasir, the Palestinian Anglican woman who has spent three periods in Israeli administrative detention and prison over the last five years.
Mullally most recently presided for the first time as president over the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Belfast, Northern Ireland. During the June 28-July 4 meeting, the council chose not to adopt changes known as the Nairobi-Cairo proposals, leaving the role of archbishop of Canterbury unchanged. The proposed structural changes also would have revised the Anglican Communion’s definition, or description, so that member provinces that are now expected to be “in communion with” the office of the archbishop of Canterbury would need only a “historical connection” to the office. Instead, the ACC adopted a resolution that affirmed the existing understanding of Anglican identity.
“Especially given the productive and hopeful commitments emerging from last week’s Anglican Consultative Council meeting, I look forward to having Archbishop Sarah with us as an expression of our renewed commitment to the Anglican Communion and our hope for the future of our ministry together,” Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe told Episcopal News Service.
Mullally was ordained to the priesthood in 2001 after a career as a nurse treating cancer patients and had served as the bishop of London since 2018. As archbishop of Canterbury, she now leads the Church of England. She serves as a “focus of unity” for all 42 autonomous, interdependent provinces of the Anglican Communion, including The Episcopal Church, which have historical roots in England.
She is the first woman to hold the office of archbishop of Canterbury in its 1,400-year history.