Anglican Church’s New Leader Vows to Seek Reconciliation
Dylan Martinez/Reuters
Justin Welby, the new archbishop of Canterbury, spoke at a news conference in London on Friday.
By ALAN COWELL
Published: November 9, 2012
LONDON — Bishop Justin Welby, the new archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual head of the world’s estimated 77 million Anglicans, pledged Friday to seek reconciliation in some of the most contentious issues of gender and sexuality that have split the Anglican Communion.
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Facundo Arrizabalaga/European Pressphoto Agency
Eleanor Welby, left, daughter of Bishop Justin Welby, new archbishop of Canterbury, sat next to May Easton, her aunt, listening to her father at a news conference at Lambeth Palace in London.
Soon after Prime Minister David Cameron announced his appointment, Bishop Welby, 56, a former oil company executive, made it clear that he endorsed earlier church statements criticizing government plans to legalize same-sex marriage.
“But I also need to listen very attentively to the L.G.B.T. communities and examine my own thinking carefully and prayerfully,” he added, referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups.
“I am always averse to the language of exclusion,” he said, apparently seeking a middle ground in the debates, which have split Anglicans from Africa to America. “Above all, in the church we need to create safe spaces for these issues to be discussed in honesty and in love.”
He said at a news conference, “We must have no truck with any form of homophobia in any part of the church.”
Drawing on a career that has taken him from the executive suites of French and British oil companies to hardscrabble parish churches in the British Midlands and to scenes of sectarian strife in Africa and the Middle East, Bishop Welby said he would bring a “passion for reconciliation” to his new position.
Bishop Welby will replace the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, who announced in March that he would step down at the end of the year. Within the Church of England, Bishop Welby faces dwindling congregations and the same divisions between conservatives and liberals as Anglicans elsewhere.
Bishop Welby emerged as the favorite to become the 105th archbishop of Canterbury only after tortuous negotiations within the Church of England that had led to frequent reports of deadlock and disagreement among members of the church commission that chose him.
His appointment is likely to be closely watched in the Vatican, where the Roman Catholic hierarchy has sought to lure Anglican priests who have become disaffected with what they see as a liberalizing trend in the Church of England.
Bishop Welby was educated at Eton. He went on to study law and history at Cambridge University before working for 11 years in the treasury departments of the French Elf Aquitaine oil company and later a British exploration company, Enterprise Oil.
His rise through the church ranks has been widely described as meteoric. He began his training as a priest in 1987 and was made a deacon in 1992. He was made bishop of Durham — the fourth-ranking diocese in the hierarchy — only a year ago.
His admirers say he is a conciliator who will be able to hold the communion together. “He and I in fact differ on the question of the blessing of same-sex unions,” said Bishop Shannon Johnston of the Diocese of Virginia, “but that has enriched and deepened our relationship and our engagement with one another.
“He has a special gift for both personal and ecclesial diplomacy,” said Bishop Johnston, who says he knows the archbishop because Virginia and Liverpool are “companion dioceses.”
This year, as a member of the upper House of Lords, to which Anglican bishops are routinely appointed, Bishop Welby joined a parliamentary panel scrutinizing the behavior of British banks. He is known as an opponent of corporate excess.
Speaking at a conference in Zurich, according to a financial Web site, he described banks as “exponents of anarchy” before the financial crisis in 2008 because they pursued “activity without purpose.”
Bishop Welby said Friday that as archbishop of Canterbury, he would remain on the panel examining banking ethics.
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