When the archbishop of Canterbury received, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, whose friends sang Christmas carols at his London residence last week, his remarks ran, as they often do, on his coronation by King Charles III in May.
The vaulted room where his guests gathered, he told them, had been used to rehearse the ceremony twice a week for four months. Members of his staff were assigned to play Charles and other royals in a rotating cast. “I always play archbishop,” he said dryly.
He then ran through the script several times with the actual king. “We rehearsed to put it up and destroy it,” Archbishop Welby later said of St. Edward’s Crown in the 17th century. “It’s a rickety old thing.”
But on the day of the coronation, before a silent assembly of 2,300 and a global television audience of hundreds of millions, the archbishop made a notable mistake: He bent down after placing the crown to check that it was sitting on level with the sovereign’s head, an unwritten step. that he vaguely looked like a carpenter inspecting his work. “I got it right,” he recalls. “I just don’t trust myself.”
Such matter-of-factness is typical of Justin Portal Welby, a trim, affable 67-year-old cleric who wears the trappings of his formidable position — the archbishop of Canterbury also serves as Primate of All England and spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide — with an almost gossamer lightness. The more relaxed formality of the Church of England meant that he was known as Mr. Welby, but his assistants simply called him Justin.
It’s not that the archbishop is not high-minded. He reached for his iPad to share a quote from midcentury American theologian and lawyer, William Stringfellow, about the “moral power of death” that triumphs over earthly empires (translation: “don’t kid yourself,” said Mr. Welby). But he also happily says he drives a seven-year-old Volkswagen Golf and admits he got a speeding ticket.
After a decade as archbishop, and with two years left before he is due to retire, Mr. Welby in his encounter with royal history. It was the highlight of a busy year in which he also made waves by condemning the British government’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda as “morally unacceptable.” As a peer in the House of Lords, he tried to amend an earlier version of the law to take a long-term view of the problems of human trafficking and mass migration.
But he is well aware of the limits to what he can accomplish before handing over to the next archbishop in 2026. A bitter, years-long debate over how the Church of England should treat same-sex marriage will not be resolved in his term, he said in an interview at Lambeth Palace, his 14th-century residence in London.
Like the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Francis, the Church of England recently began allowing priests to bless same-sex couples. But it continues to argue for a more formal recognition of these unions. Conservative clerics in Britain sent a letter to the church’s ruling House of Bishops, objecting to the blessings, while 10 Anglican archbishops from Africa and Latin America rejected Mr. Welby as their leader — technically, he acts as first of equals — over similar objections.
Mr. tried Welby to lead the middle course. “Each person is of equal importance,” he said, “including LGBTQIA+ people.” But he insisted that the debate in their unions could not be forced. The dispute was personally painful: Some of his oldest friends in the church resisted his cautious steps toward recognition, while reformers complained that he was confused.
“This is a high-wire act for the Church of England because there are deep divisions and disagreements,” Mr Welby said. “We have to deal with this as a family dispute and not a political dispute. In other words, don’t break up.”
“Everybody probably feels at this moment, I’m too fast and too slow,” he admitted. “That’s life.”
It’s a phrase the archbishop used more than once, and it suggests an equanimity honed in a life of fatal twists and turns.
Born in London to a mother who worked as a personal secretary to Winston Churchill and a wayward, mysterious father who ran two failed campaigns for Parliament, Mr. Welby his childhood as “messy.” His parents, both alcoholics, divorced when he was 3. His father was engaged to actress Vanessa Redgrave.
In 2016, Mr. Welby discovered through a DNA test that his biological father was not Gavin Welby, but Sir Anthony Montague Browne, Churchill’s private secretary, with whom his mother, Jane Williams, had of an engagement before his first marriage. The mother of Mr. Welby, who quit drinking years ago, died last summer at age 93.
Educated at Eton College, training ground for princes and prime ministers, Mr Welby said he first felt a religious calling while a student at Cambridge University. He began attending Holy Trinity Brompton, a prominent evangelical Anglican congregation in Kensington.
“He found God in a classic Protestant evangelical experience,” said Charles Moore, a former editor of The Daily Telegraph who was a year behind the future archbishop at Eton. “It fills you with a sense of urgency.”
But Mr. Welby first embarked on a career more typical of his elite, as a finance executive at the French oil company Elf Aquitaine.
Living in Paris with his wife Caroline, Mr. Welby has earned a reputation for being an astute reader of the markets. He became treasurer of a British firm, Enterprise Oil, and traveled to broker oil exploration deals. But he never lost his sense of higher calling, and in 1989, he resigned to join the priesthood.
His rise in the church hierarchy was even faster than his rise in the oil industry. After serving as a canon at Coventry Cathedral and dean of Liverpool, he was appointed bishop of Durham in 2011. Almost a year later, he was appointed to succeed Rowan Williams as archbishop of Canterbury, the 105th to hold a post whose origin dates back to 597.
The transition from oil to holy oil is less likely than it might seem, Mr. Welby said. Both are built on the principle of taking big risks for bigger rewards. “It’s an industry where you drill 10, 20 wells at a time that you can actually find anything but water, and it’s pretty sandy water at that,” he said.
The danger in the priesthood, said Mr. Welby, is that people will reject the Gospel of Jesus. (He declined to compare his success as a pastor to that of an oil prospector, saying that judgment should be left for future generations.) Still, he said his years in business gave him a sense of not inevitable horror of secular society – or, as he puts it, “a really profound recognition of how irrelevant the church is to so many people in this country.”
Mr. Welby has no magic cure, but he stresses the in-the-trenches work of parishes — the “coal face” of the church, he calls them — to reach “those who are not often easily embraced. ”
Attendance at Sunday services dropped between 20 percent and 25 percent during the coronavirus pandemic, and has yet to recover. Candidates for the priesthood dropped 14 percent last year, even though the church has ordained women for nearly three decades and allowed them to become bishops in 2014. That last change, which Mr. Welby pushed because of deep resistance, is probably his most consequential legacy.
But this kind of boldness also occasionally got him into trouble, especially when running an ancient, highly decentralized institution like the Anglican Church. “He shoots slightly from the hip,” said Mr. Moore, the fellow Etonian.
Cabinet ministers have brushed off his criticism of their immigration policy. While the archbishop did not argue that Britain should fight uncontrolled migration, he said it needed a more strategic policy. Putting asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda, Mr. Welby said, falls under a country with Britain’s human rights tradition, though he expressed skepticism that any plane would divert .
“Frankly, it’s a symbolic gesture,” he said of the revised draft law, which was recently moved from the House of Commons for review to the House of Lords. “This is essentially a performative bill.”
For all his interest in the legislative process, the archbishop is a dedicated servant of the monarchy. He bristles at criticism of one of his innovations for the coronation: a voluntary oath of homage to the king, sworn publicly, at home and in Westminster Abbey. Critics called it patronizing, but he said it was a democratizing gesture, since in previous coronations only the hereditary aristocracy had sworn allegiance.
“There is no guard behind you with a fixed bayonet in every household in the land,” he said. “It’s a small thing. Just chill.”
Mr. aside Welby is another report meant to illustrate his closeness to the royal family: that Charles once asked him to try to broker a deal with his estranged son, Prince Harry, so that the Duke of Sussex could attend the coronation.
“I have no faith in my own powers of reconciliation,” he said. “I have a deep belief in God’s power of reconciliation.”
