Bishop of Newcastle Helen-Ann Hartley: 'I'll be surprised if the next Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman'

A single decade has passed since the Church ordained its first female bishop. At that point there had been women MPs for nearly 100 years and the country was about to see its second female Prime Minister.

The Sex Discrimination Act had been in force for some 40 years and even the most discriminatory of Yorkshire’s working men’s clubs had relaxed their policies of not allowing women at the bar.

The Church was the last to change and to this day its transition remains a work in progress.

It had begun to admit women priests in 1994 when Angela Berners-Wilson and 31 others were ordained at Bristol Cathedral following a vote by the General Synod two years before.

It was the culmination of a long campaign from the lower ranks.

“I think the church has changed for the better,” said Bishop Helen-Ann. “It’s a richer church now because women are able to participate fully.”

But in a wide-ranging interview with The Yorkshire Post to mark International Women’s Day, she also speaks of feeling isolated, and of what she calls the “wilful collusion” of “tribes” within the Church acting against progress – not only on inclusion but also the safeguarding of young people, an issue that spectacularly brought down Justin Welby, the last Archbishop of Canterbury.

In contrast to Berners-Wilson, who spent 15 years in the deaconry before being welcomed controversially into the priesthood, Helen-Ann Hartley became a priest just a year after being ordained as a deacon in the Oxford diocese. That was in 2006 when she was 33.

In 2010 she relocated to the North Island of New Zealand where she became Bishop of Waikato. By 2017 she was back in Britain as Bishop of Ripon.

The daughter of a Church of Scotland minister, married to a musician, she has been Bishop of Newcastle for two years, succeeding the Right Reverend Christine Hardman.

Some believe she should now succeed Welby, though the idea is deeply contentious among traditionalists.

What is beyond question is that it was she who helped precipitate his extraordinary resignation four months ago.

In normal circumstances, the Archbishop of York might expect to be elevated to Lambeth Palace.

But Stephen Cottrell, the current incumbent, is implicated in safeguarding scandals of his own and facing calls – not least from Bishop Helen-Ann – to withdraw from high office altogether. So who else might be in the frame?

“I will personally be surprised if the next Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman,” is how she responds to the cheerleading on her behalf, pointing out that not only the Church itself but also the Anglican Communion of some 85 million members around the world would have to be brought on board.

“I mean, I’m always open to the movement of the Holy Spirit, so if it is a woman then thanks be to God. But I think we’ve a way to go yet before we see a woman in such a senior role.”

In any case, leaving aside the symbolic difference a female appointment would make, would a woman necessarily do the job any differently?

“That’s a really difficult question because every person brings different skills and gifts into the role. But I do wonder if a female Archbishop of Canterbury would bring a different set of emotional skills – that perspective of deep listening, of qualities of nurturing,” she said.

“It very much depends on the individual. I can think of some males, past and present, who also exhibit those qualities.”

Authority

In her current role, Helen-Ann Hartley’s outspokenness has set her apart from her male peers.

At a time when the Church has ceded some of its moral authority and become increasingly silent on ethical issues, not least this week on Ukraine, hers is the voice that has most often cut through.

She has noticed, she said, that her interventions on internal Church affairs had prompted parishioners to ask why women ministers were more likely than men to speak out.

Were priests just looking after themselves, they wondered.

It’s a subject that clearly rankles, particularly after the absence of support from her male colleagues.

“It goes back to this question of old boys’ networks, protection and not naming things. Whether it’s coincidental or not that I spoke out and I happen to be female, I don’t know.

"I just did it because it was the right thing to do. I actually expected some people to support me and that didn’t happen, but that’s how it goes.

"There are questions here that the Church traditionally is not great at reckoning with.”

She blames tradition and what she calls “top-down management” in the Church that has prevented more of her peers from demanding change, especially after the damning independent report into the alleged sadistic abuse of more than 100 boys and young men over several decades which led to Welby’s resignation.

“It will take somebody with a bit of steel and resilience to grasp those dysfunctional nettles at the heart of the church institution,” she said.

“I think people are looking, for once, for a bit of leadership and clarity from the Church – particularly in that area, because it’s affected so many lives and continues to do so.”

She has suggested in the past that careerism was what fuelled the silence of so many of her peers, bringing to mind timid men in fear of damaging their prospects.

“It was fed back to me that the colleagues were upset so I ended up apologising for that,” she said. “But I think at the deepest level there is a bit of that in play. There’s a bit of fear, quite a lot of fear, I think.

“But fundamentally, the institution of the Church is very good at internalising narrative and going round in circles, and actually if we stopped and really thought carefully about where we are as a Church institution at the moment and how our failings on safeguarding have been portrayed and perceived, rightly, by many people, we might find a voice to be bold and courageous.

"But I haven’t heard that publicly from any of my colleagues. That’s why I’ve felt isolated – because nobody has spoken out in support of any of my interventions. That’s a real shame.”

Her advice to her superiors is unequivocal: “They should spend a good amount of time simply listening to the voices of people on the ground and absorbing some of the frustration that people have felt by several years of top-down management.”

A particular bone of contention is the watering-down of safeguarding proposals at the General Synod last month that fell short of the fully transparent system she advocates: a mechanism overseen by people other than bishops that would protect young people at summer camps and other events organised by the Church.

Philip North, the Bishop of Blackburn, who led a motion which delayed indefinitely such a project, said after the vote that he had acted to avoid “making promises to survivors, to the nation, to the Church, that we couldn’t then deliver”.

Bishop Helen-Ann takes a different view.

“I found that deeply, deeply sad and frustrating. Until we get full transparency, accountability and independence in safeguarding, we will keep getting ourselves into these terrible situations.

“Bishops are not safeguarding professionals. We shouldn’t be doing it. Of course, we have responsibility for setting culture and tone and ensuring that our churches are safe, but in order to do that work well, surely we have to be held to account for it.

“But we have not been able to be honest about our failings and actually say we can’t do this work. We need to be held to account fully, and that means full independence, both in scrutiny and in operations.”

The controversy has brought to light decades of abuse, systematically concealed by generations of leaders.

“Historically, there has been a wilful collusion and covering-up of safeguarding failings, and what we’re seeing is all that’s being brought into the light now and being rightly challenged and questioned,” Bishop Helen-Ann said.

Asked to identify the wilful colluders in the cases of alleged serial abuse by, among others, John Smyth, a predatory church worker and barrister who recruited victims from schools into “Christian forums” and carried out wholesale, sadistic abuse, she points to the 10 senior members of clergy against whom disciplinary proceedings have now been instigated.

Their number includes another former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, as well as the Reverend Andrew Cornes, who was due to be on the committee picking the next incumbent.

Safeguarding

Whoever now gets that job will have to signal a clear change of tone, she said.

“There’s a huge job to be done in regaining trust and credibility, particularly around the area of safeguarding. So I think a new archbishop has really got to signal very clearly a direction of travel on safeguarding and to be given the support to drive that change.

“We can’t have an Archbishop of Canterbury who tries to be a crowd pleaser for everybody. You just can’t lead in that context. People look for clarity.

"There are lots of groups and tribes and factions in the Church of England. And in some ways, being Archbishop of Canterbury is an impossible job because how can you hold all of that together with complete integrity?

"Somebody’s going to have to be disappointed at some point. But keeping people in the room is not a one-off thing. It’s a lifetime’s journey.”

The Archbishop might start, she believes, by listening to grassroots voices within the parishes and understanding “what it looks like to regain the Church from the ground up”, allowing communities to flourish “without having to meet management-driven targets”.

She said: “Can we just allow some freedom and some creativity at the local level in a way that honours all of our contexts? I’m thinking particularly of communities in more rural areas who struggle for basic services – internet access, transport.

"Let’s grow the Church to really be a presence in every community, which is what the parish church is about.”

Those parishes, she suggests, have long lacked a voice at national level.

One of my sadnesses in the last two or three months has been the way in which the institutional dysfunction has undermined the morale of the local parishes.

“The Church of England is still the established church and it still retains a sense of presence and place that is most keenly felt locally.

"That’s a world away from the institution of the Church, the machinations of the General Synod or the archbishops and the leadership, although of course when something goes wrong, then it really does undermine what happens on the ground.”

On the other hand, she points out, a few of those grassroots parishes have still to come to terms with women ministers, let alone archbishops.

“Here in Newcastle the vast majority of parishes are fully accepting of the ministry of women.

"It’s a very different picture in, for example, London where there are a lot more traditional parishes and some conservative or evangelical parts of the Church that would not accept women’s ministry.”

Resistance comes more often from church officials than from the flock, she said. “I suspect if you knocked on people’s doors and said, ‘Are you aware that your local church doesn’t accept the full ministry of women’, people might be quite surprised and disappointed to hear it.”

Sustainability

In her current role, Bishop Helen-Ann is one of the 26 Lords Spiritual; bishops and archbishops who sit in the House of Lords. Currently seven are women.

She acknowledges that changing values of society, coupled with internal strife within the Church, threatens the sustainability of that role in the long term.

“I fully accept that people are right to ask questions about why there are still clerics in the House of Lords or in any part of our parliamentary system,” she said.

“I see and hear colleagues, bishops, speak out on issues in their locality. Those in the House of Lords speak out all the time on a wide range of topics.

"But whereas five or 10 years ago it might have been headline news, you now wonder if anybody is really listening or interested in what the Church has to say.

"Is it getting harder for the Church’s voice to be heard in any meaningful way or are we just one voice among many?

“And actually, maybe what we need to be doing is to be more creatively in partnership with others, rather than assuming that we’ve got the sole right to speak out on an issue.”

The area in which the Church is most compromised, she says, is the continuance in office of Stephen Cottrell, currently the acting Archbishop of Canterbury in addition to his ministry in York.

“There is a moral authority vested in the archbishops to speak to the global political landscape and right now my view is that the institution and its leadership is deeply compromised and lacking credibility because of what has happened in the safeguarding landscape,” she said.

“That has diminished the Church’s capacity to speak out and be trusted and listened to.

“At this point you would traditionally look to somebody like the Archbishop of Canterbury to give a clear voice.

"Obviously, we don’t have an Archbishop of Canterbury at the moment but it’s my view that the Archbishop of York lacks credibility in the public space.

“He has exhibited considerable failure in the area of safeguarding and I have called on him to resign.

"That view has not changed. So I think it would be impossible for him to take on board being Archbishop of Canterbury.

“People are looking to the Church for that voice of reason, that prophetic voice. I don’t see or hear that in the life of the institution of the Church at the moment.”