Appointment of Dame Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury may portend positive change in the Episcopal Church

The news earlier today that the Rt. Rev. Sarah Mullally has been named Archbishop of Canterbury may spell good news for the Episcopal Church. Specifically, Mullally, the former bishop of London, has long called for a revolution in safeguarding practices within the Church of England, including:

• Addressing a lack of accountability at all levels within the church.
• Disjointed governance.
• A failure to follow safeguarding procedures.
• Most importantly, a defective, unsafe culture within the church.

These issues are, in our experience, even worse in the Episcopal Church.

Thus, we hope that Mullally’s urgent calls for change will incentivize a deeply corrupt Episcopal Church to fix its own inability to address abuse, both sexual and non-sexual.

Shared problems in both provinces

In February 2025, Mullally penned an opinion piece on safeguarding issues within the Church of England. While we identified her top-level concerns earlier in this post, it’s worth unpacking several of the specific problems she flagged and examining whether the same issues exist in the Anglican province of the Episcopal Church (TEC).

Accountability/unhealthy culture

On the topic of accountability and unhealthy culture, Mullally’s comments about the Church of England sound painfully familiar in the context of TEC:

The last six months has seen the publication of the Makin and Scolding reports, laying bare a string of shocking safeguarding failures, fostered in unhealthy cultures in the Church of England. Lives have been devastated — and hurt and damage continues to be done.

On this score, Anglican Watch has documented dozens of cases of sexual assault, criminal conduct, and non-sexual abuse by clergy within TEC in which judicatories have either:

• Ignored the matter entirely.
• Initiated a Title IV process, but refused to follow the provisions of Title IV.
• Initiated a Title IV process, but sandbagged the complaint.
• Attempted, as in the case of Todd Ousley, to implement their own unauthorized processes in lieu of Title IV.
• Retaliated for the filing of a Title IV complaint, as happened in the case of alleged sexual assault at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue.
• Actively supplied false information to law enforcement and others in order to interfere with law enforcement’s investigation into allegations of child sex abuse, as happened in the Diocese of Alabama under Glenda Curry.

A common thread in these cases has been zero accountability for the bishop in question.

Failures of process

Here’s what Mullally says on this topic:

The issues here lie particularly around appointments and in the handling of concerns and complaints. Robust and transparent appointments processes are vital to the health of any institution. Proposals regarding the appointment of diocesan bishops will be brought to this week’s session of the General Synod. They arise from concerns that what was designed as a confidential process has become perceived as covert and secret, leading to a lack of transparency. The General Synod has an opportunity to address this vital issue.

Proposals are also being brought to the Synod relating to the handling of complaints against clergy. They are an improvement — but are they enough? Do they take account of individuals who struggle, for a multiplicity of reasons, to engage with process? Do they recognise the reality of the imbalance of power between clergy colleagues, or laity and clergy? How do we ensure that these better processes are genuinely and consistently accompanied by good pastoral care for everybody involved? Emphasis added.

On this score, TEC’s huge and creaky infrastructure is de facto controlled largely by two people: The presiding bishop and the president of the house of deputies.

How so?

The answer is simple: These two individuals almost exclusively determine membership on the myriad committees that control access to decision-making at General Convention and elsewhere. Even worse, the process lacks the admittedly thin supervision that comes from Parliament in the case of the Church of England. As a result, gossip among a small group of insiders is the basis for the vast majority of decisions made by the church.

As to safeguarding processes, we have yet to see a Title IV case in the Episcopal Church in which the judicatories followed the required processes.

Not once.

Mullally also raises an excellent point about pastoral care. While Title IV contemplates a “pastoral response,” which may include pastoral care but should go far beyond that, we have only seen one Title IV complaint in which a diocese has followed this requirement. Indeed, even dioceses that take clergy discipline seriously often assume that assigning a priest for pastoral care is adequate — despite the express Title IV provisions calling for more.

Transparency of process is also important in the context of Title IV. Bishops diocesan have the latitude to share Title IV information to provide a pastoral response.

Yet, invariably, we see judicatories conflate confidentiality with secrecy, with the result that details of almost all Title IV matters get swept under the rug. “Nothing to see, move along,” becomes the modus operandi, at a time when church members desperately need to hear that the church takes abuse seriously, listens to their concerns, and shows care and concern for its members.

Speaking of the Title IV process, we note that judicatories in TEC ignore much of Title IV in practice.

Indeed, while Title IV proscribes a wide range of behavior by clergy, the reality is that if a complaint doesn’t involve sex, drugs, children, or money, chances are slim to none that judicatories will take it seriously.

We have documented multiple instances of criminal conduct by Episcopal clergy in which the relevant dioceses refuse to act. Relatedly, we have scant hope that the defamation per se in the St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue case, in which Bishop Matthew Heyd and others flagrantly spread falsehoods about the alleged victim of sexual assault, will ever result in consequences for Heyd.

Failure of management:

On this topic, Mullally’s specific comments are relevant primarily to the Church of England. But her concern about the quality of management in the church is germane to the Episcopal Church.

On this score, both the national church and the dioceses of TEC are hot messes, marked by:

• Lack of information on investments.
• Broken internal financial controls.
• Overlapping and conflicting lines of authority.
• Lack of effective policies.
• Failure to comply with denominational canons.

Indeed, many dioceses have failed to take the rudimentary step of ensuring that parishes comply with the accession clause mandated under church canons. As a result, courts in various jurisdictions have held that TEC is NOT legally hierarchical.

It doesn’t get much more basic than that.

Moreover, church financial reporting is a farce, with relevant details deliberately obscured via blended budgets. As a result, standing committees and vestries alike are forced to depend on the often self-serving statements of clergy that “everything is fine,” even when that’s obviously not the case.

And, even a cursory review of safeguarding practices in the Roman church makes clear that the Episcopal Church is far from being a leader in safe church policies and procedures—despite its fabrications to the contrary.

For example, the Diocese of New York safeguarding page—which only addresses sexual misconduct, despite the canonical mandate to publicize Title IV generally, is stunning in its lack of content. See: https://dioceseny.org/report-sexual-harassment-or-misconduct/

By contrast, the Roman Archdiocese of New York maintains a robust safe church presence, including a reference to protection against retaliation for reporting. Imagine that. https://archny.org/report/

Looking to the future

So, what does all this mean for the Church of England and TEC? Can Mullally, as a reformer, change almost 2,000 years of ingrained bad behavior? Can she inspire TEC to clean up its act?

We’d like to think so, but we are dubious. After all, even in its current dismal condition, the Church of England is big, tradition-bound, and sloppily assembled. Meanwhile, the modern public just isn’t as impressed these days with the pageantry and empty triumphalism of events at Westminster Cathedral — or the National Cathedral. And the notion that an archbishop gets “enthroned” seems silly in a day and age where the church struggles just to pay its bills.

That said, if Anglicanism is to survive, and this seems increasingly doubtful, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Church of England, and Anglicanism as a whole must urgently get their act together.

As things stand, Anglicanism is hurtling toward the abyss, a vestigial monument to 19th-century churchmanship that increasingly looks irrelevant and downright corrupt in a 21st-century society. And let us hope that TEC presiding bishop Sean Rowe and the episcopacy recognize that the church faces an existential crisis that must be addressed immediately if it is to survive.