The Archbishop of York takes temporary charge of the Church of England after the resignation of Justin Welby

Forced to resign for his management of a scandal of physical and sexual assault on dozens of children, the head of the Church of England, Justin Welby, on Monday January 6 gave his place to the Archbishop of York , Stephen Cottrell, who temporarily takes over as head of this institution in turmoil.

At 69, the spiritual leader of the Anglicans was forced from office after the publication in early November of a damning report concluding that he had failed to immediately report to the authorities an attacker who had attacked more than one hundred and thirty children and young men for several decades. This man, a lawyer linked to the Church of England, died in 2018 in South Africa without ever having been worried.

This scandal shocked the United Kingdom and sparked numerous calls for fundamental reform of the Church of England, whose supreme head is the British sovereign. It has around twenty million baptized faithful, but the number of regular practitioners is estimated at just under 1 million, according to 2022 figures.

The future head of the Church of England will be appointed by the king, Charles III, following a long selection process, led by a former head of the internal security service, MI5. His name will not be known until the fall, according to British media. In the meantime, it is the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, 66, the second highest dignitary in the Church, who takes interim head of the institution.

Cottrell criticized for his handling of a child crime case

After a final day spent in his official residence at Lambeth Palace in London, Justin Welby will return his stick on Monday during a religious service to be held at the end of the day. In recent weeks, Stephen Cottrell has already started to replace him during several official ceremonies. In his Christmas sermon he called on the Church to “to do penance”.

But this man already has weakened authority, while he is also criticized for his management of a child crime case. He is accused of having kept in office a priest who had been prohibited by the institution from being alone with children after several cases of sexual assault. Stephen Cottrell, ordained priest at 25 and became Archbishop of York in 2020, recognized that things “could have been handled differently”.

While he was a legitimate potential successor to Justin Welby, this affair should prevent him from being permanently appointed. He himself admitted that he had little chance of being chosen because of his age. “We need someone who can give at least five years, probably more than ten years. So I don’t consider myself a candidate”he said in November.

“Restore confidence”

The future head of the Church, born from a split with the Catholic Church in the 16th^e century, will have to work to restore the image of the institution, accused on several occasions of having covered up sexual assault scandals within it. Already in 2020, a report denounced a « culture » allowing perpetrators of sexual assault on minors to “to hide” and to be “more supported than the victims”. In February 2024, another report concluded that the Church must “act urgently to restore confidence in its protection system” after several cases of assault.

The Church of England must also confront the divisions within it, which crystallized in particular in 2023 on the possibility of blessing same-sex couples, finally painfully validated at the end of an unusually agitated synod. .

This development is also contested within the Anglican Communion, which claims around 85 million faithful in more than 165 countries, and of which the Church of England is the mother church. It must therefore confront more conservative trends, particularly in certain African countries.

In the wake of his decision to bless same-sex couples, archbishops representing the majority of Anglicans in the South said they rejected the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury as spiritual leader.