Archbishop of Canterbury’s upcoming visit may inspire the Episcopal Church to address its clergy discipline problem. Or not.

Newly installed Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally has announced that she will visit the United States on September 25 and 26, 2026, during which she’ll visit the Episcopal dioceses of New York and Connecticut. Some believe her visit may encourage the US church to address its broken

clergy disciplinary process, while others, including this publication, are dubious. This post explores the reasons for both perspectives.

So why are some positive about the potential effect of a visit from Mullally?

From the start of her tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury (ABC), the bishop who serves as the first among equals among the independent provinces of the Anglican Communion, Mullally has vowed to improve trust and accountability within the Church of England, particularly amidst complaints that the church has repeatedly failed victims of abuse.

Mullally made her comments after her predecessor, Justin Welby, resigned following allegations that he knowingly mishandled complaints from victims of sexual abuse. Moreover, this publication documented that Welby repeatedly lied about his own role in these issues.

More recently, a formal Church of England study found that “pervasive distrust” in the Church of England can be remedied only by holding clergy accountable.

The study, Trust and Trustworthiness in the Church of England: Listening and responding to usual and unusual challenges, was produced by Professor Veronica Hope Hailey, a former Dean of the Business School at the University of Bristol, and drew upon 74 interviews with bishops, clergy, lay people, and members of the national church institutions.

Hailey stated:

Whilst no one wants to return to the feudal patriarchal structures of the past, if the institution is to restore trust with the society it is meant to serve, clerical accountability must be vigorously tackled.

This message could — we emphasize could — resonate for the Episcopal Church, which we have repeatedly documented as having:

1. Covered up abuse.
2. Ignored criminal activity.
3. Permitted retaliation against complainants in the clergy disciplinary process.
4. Told victims to go to court if they have an issue with their priest’s behavior.
5. Lied about the circumstances around misconduct involving priests and bishops.
6. Refused to follow its own clergy disciplinary canons.

Moreover, the two dioceses Mullally plans to visit are at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to taking clergy discipline seriously.

On the one hand, the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, while not perfect, has long enjoyed a reputation for even-handed, trauma-informed responses to allegations of clergy misconduct.

The Episcopal Diocese of New York, on the other hand, has one of the most thoroughly broken Title IV processes in the church and routinely ignores key canonical requirements, including the requirement that neither the intake officer nor the reference panel may make findings of fact. Indeed, the Diocese got its sketch backside sued over these issues; even so, intake officer Alison Quin and others refuse to follow the canons.

Meanwhile, Mullally’s itinerary reveals that she’ll be meeting with the worst offender of all when it comes to Title IV: None other than presiding bishop Sean Rowe. As we have documented countless times, the church’s intake officer for bishops, Barb Kempf, reports to Rowe. Yet Kempf routinely plays fast and loose with clergy discipline, including making unauthorized findings of fact and reaching improper conclusions of canon law.

Even worse, we can say, based on first-hand knowledge, that Rowe, the Title IV Reference Panel for Bishops, and Disciplinary Chair Bishop Nick Knisely are fully aware of Kempf’s misfeasance in office.

Despite this, Kempf continues to play fast and loose with clergy discipline, including one laughably bad decision, in which she decreed that, despite what General Convention (and her own churchwide Title IV training materials) say about a pastoral response being required in ALL Title IV cases, Bishop Todd Ousley couldn’t be disciplined for ignoring this provision.

Why, you wonder?

Well, according to Kempf, it wasn’t customary for Ousley to obey the canons, so he didn’t have to.

In other words, don’t worry about canon law. As long as you ignore it consistently, you’re good to go.

In other words, if Mullally is serious about promoting accountability and integrity, this is a conversational topic that could easily grow legs. Indeed, Mullally is uniquely positioned to share with Episcopal Church leaders what happens when you lose all credibility by refusing to act with integrity. If nothing else, the Church of England is still the established church. Yet, despite this advantage, the church is fast becoming little more than ratty old buildings, overgrown churchyards, and a ceremonial appendage to royal events.

On the other hand, there’s ample room to be pessimistic about Mullally’s visit

Speaking of being uniquely positioned to talk about what happens when a church doesn’t act with integrity/accountability, we are still gobsmacked that Atlanta bishop Rob Wright invited disgraced ABC Justin Welby to bounce through his diocese. Not only was doing so contrary to canon, but it was ominously fitting, as Rob Wright is every bit as bad as Welby when it comes to addressing clergy misconduct.

Something about birds of a feather.

That said, our concerns go well beyond Wright’s welcoming Welby, despite the latter’s role in covering up child sexual abuse.

Specific concerns:

• We have documented countless incidents in which Episcopal Church officials have refused to fulfill their obligations as mandatory reporters of child sexual abuse.
• Dozens of Episcopal officials ignored the anguished pleas for help from the victim of a childhood rape by Episcopal priest Richard Losch, who remains a priest in good standing. This, despite a grand jury indictment against him over these very issues.
• The comments of retired Episcopal bishop Herman “Holly” Hollerith, who said, in an email to the victim in the Losch case, that he “Wouldn’t touch this complain with a 1000 ft pole” (It’s good to know that Episcopal bishops can choose to ignore the rape of children. At least now we know where they stand on issues of personal integrity.)
• Even DUI and the welfare of children don’t seem to matter, as evinced by the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta and its decision to ignore the ongoing problems with Episcopal priest Ben Day — including his failure to abide by a court order that prohibits him from drinking. (We have documented that, per his own social media posts, he not only drinks, but does so when apparently driving with kids in the car.)
• And, of course, the list goes on and on.

In other words, the Episcopal Church’s woes extend far beyond the provisions of the cumbersome and ineffective Title IV process. Instead, we have a broad and deep cultural defect that extends to every level of the Episcopal Church.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Being the narcissistic construct that it is, the Episcopal Church has zero introspection.

Why is that a problem?

The answer is simple: We cannot fix that which we cannot see. Thus, we’re not sure that the Episcopal Church even can know that it has a problem.

Moreover, contrary to what the Securities and Exchange Commission says, past results indeed are an effective indicator of future performance. Given that the church has been “studying” these issues since the 1970s, we see zero sign of any urgency. Or even any real interest in fixing issues with clergy discipline.

Nor is Sean Rowe showing any signs of living up to his promise to be a reformer of Title IV. Not only is he retaining the feckless and corrupt Barb Kempf as intake officer for bishops, but we see little effort to address these issues with any urgency.

So, as 12-step groups are fond of saying, “the first step is acknowledging that you have a problem.” But we don’t see that Mullally either can or will stage an intervention; if nothing else, she’s far too careful to show up and say, in the words of the late Joan Rivers, “Can we talk?”

As a result, Mullally may be trying to offset the damage done by Welby’s visit to the US. Or she may be trying to shore up relationships with key progressive provinces in the Anglican Communion.

Or she may implicitly be responding to Sean Rowe’s noisy comments last March, in which he decried claims that the Episcopal Church is dying as “a lie from the pit of Hell.”

On that score, all we can say is that, if the current state of the Episcopal Church reflects anything other than a church in the final days of hospice, we’d hate to see what Rowe thinks a dying church looks like.

All that aside, we’re returning to our usual assessment of the church, which is that we can know it by the fruits that it bears, including:

• Grooming of children.
• Cover-up of child sex abuse.
• Refusal to obey mandatory child abuse reporting laws.
• Bishops who condone perjury and other felonious behavior, typically on the basis that there’s been no criminal conviction. We hope that the need for a criminal conviction doesn’t bar bishops from addressing child sex abuse; that said, the refusal of the Diocese of Alabama to defrock Richard Losch suggests to us that this is, de facto, a requirement.
• The repeated abuse of civil protective orders by clergy to try to shut down criticism of them, as occurred in the case of Episcopal priestWill Bouvel.
• An absolute unwillingness to hold Episcopal bishops accountable. Indeed, intake officer Barb Kempf goes out of her way to sandbag complaints against clergy.
• A pattern and practice of treating church canons as polite suggestions, rather than mandatory rules of the road.

Then, of course, we bump into the fact that Mullally may not have the street creds needed to discuss accountability. Indeed, before Mullally’s installation as ABC, news stories swirled about how she allegedly mishandled sexual abuse complaints in her role as Bishop of London. Yet, despite written evidence that Mullally did, in fact, mishandle complaints, the Church of England largely brushed the concerns aside.

Here is what the Telegraph has to say on this score:

N [the victim] added that the “reality” of the Church of England is that “it is a shell institution, which not just departs from the Christian gospel, but actively works against the Christian gospel, and is not so much a church of Christ as a church of Pontius Pilate”.

He said: “Its hierarchy has a catastrophic, shocking disregard for integrity and truth.

“They have demonstrated in their record that they speak out of both sides of their mouth. So on the one hand, you have people like Stephen Cottrell and Justin Welby and Sarah Mullaly shedding tears on camera for survivors, while, on the other hand, they’re absolutely armed to the teeth [with lawyers and PR firms] against survivors.

“And so I have felt like I have wandered, naively, into this space which purports to represent Christian values. And what I have actually found is an institution that is ruthless and self-serving.”

So what’s the bottom line?

At this point, we’re left hoping for the best from Mullaly’s visit. But, even while we try to remain optimistic, we have a sinking feeling that not only are the Church of England and the Episcopal Church more similar than either would care to admit, but they may well be racing to see which organization can implode sooner.