The Church of England is confused. In truth, it has been ever since the Act of Supremacy and King Henry VIII’s removal of the prayers for the Pope from the Mass (at the time, remarkably sacramentalist and still in Latin). Always a rather ephemeral thing, it has wrestled back and forth in a perpetual identity crisis.
It has, at times, produced virtuous men and women of sincere piety – even beautiful poetry and music attempting to render sincere honour and worship to Jesus Christ. Yet, with the appointment of Dame Sarah Mullally to the see of Canterbury, perhaps the starkest sign has finally arrived which reveals to all who care to ponder that this institution is essentially cut off from the living apostolic heritage of the old Christian world, that England’s institutions have snipped themselves from her past, and that we are possessed by ever more perilous gender confusion.
