Archbishop of Canterbury

The Archbishop of Canterbury leads the Church of England as its senior bishop and holds a unique, largely symbolic primacy across the worldwide Anglican Communion, a fellowship of national and regional churches that trace their origin to the Church of England but operate under their own autonomous governance. The see was founded in 597 CE when the monk Augustine, sent from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great, established a mission at Canterbury in the kingdom of Kent, making it the oldest continuously occupied bishopric in England.

For nearly a thousand years the archbishops of Canterbury were in communion with Rome. That changed under Henry VIII, whose break with the papacy in the 1530s, driven by his need for an annulment Rome would not grant, made the English monarch rather than the pope the Church's supreme authority. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who granted that annulment, went on to shape the Church of England's early liturgy and doctrine before being burned at the stake under the Catholic Queen Mary I in 1556, one of the office's most consequential and most dangerous tenures.

The Archbishop crowns the British monarch, convenes the Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops roughly once a decade, and speaks for the Church of England in Parliament as one of the Lords Spiritual. Anglican provinces outside England, from the Episcopal Church in the United States to the Church of Nigeria, are not under the Archbishop's jurisdiction, and the Communion has strained in recent decades over disagreements the Archbishop can moderate but not resolve by decree.

Unlike offices filled by election or hereditary succession, the Archbishop of Canterbury is formally appointed by the British monarch, who acts on the advice of the Prime Minister. Since 2007 the substantive choice has rested with the Crown Nominations Commission, a body of Church and lay representatives that submits a preferred name and a reserve name for forwarding to the monarch, a process designed to give the Church itself the practical say while preserving the constitutional form of royal appointment inherited from the Reformation settlement. There is no fixed term; archbishops serve until they resign, and recent holders have stepped down around the age of seventy.

The office has produced figures of lasting consequence beyond Church governance. Anselm of Canterbury, appointed in 1093, was one of medieval Europe's foremost philosophers and originated the ontological argument for God's existence. Thomas Becket's 1170 murder in Canterbury Cathedral, following his conflict with Henry II over the rights of Church courts, made him a martyr and turned the cathedral into one of medieval Christendom's great pilgrimage sites. In the twentieth century, William Temple's wartime leadership and Robert Runcie's role in reconciling the Communion after the Falklands War showed the office's capacity to speak on matters well beyond parish life, even without the coercive authority a Roman Catholic pope holds over Catholic bishops.