“UNPRECEDENTED” is a word that wore thin with overuse during the pandemic. It is rarely easy to determine which events in history will prove to be seismic, and yet it is hard to frame the events of the past fortnight as anything other than a watershed: we have no precedent. Optimists may seize upon the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury (News, 15 November) as the moment when the hierarchy accepted accountability. Many have pointed out that he was brought down by his own insistence during office that there were no excuses for poor practice in investigations into historic abuses. Realists would do well to face some hard truths: there has never been a time when trust within the Church was so low. The General Synod debated a report earlier this year which recorded a high level of mistrust in almost every relationship in the Church of England. The researchers heard reports of “unawareness of and abuse of power”, “a lack of accountability”, “issues around confidentiality”, and profound divisions over theology (News and Leader Comment, 28 June; News, 12 July). Social media had only contributed to “toxicity”.

If this is how the institution feels on the inside, it is unsurprising that the view from outside is far worse. The events of the past week are unlikely to have helped. “The crisis of trust is also about the failure of the C of E to carve out a distinctive new role in 21st-century society,” the report’s author, Professor Veronica Hope Hailey, told the Synod in July. Tensions with Parliament have been stretched to the limit: the bishops may — just — have hung on to their seats in the House of Lords for now (News, 15 November), but the inability to resolve the issue of same-sex marriage may prove to be the final straw in relations with government.

Closing our churches during the pandemic — when access to sacred space was, arguably, needed more than ever — certainly didn’t help the Church’s standing. A report three years ago — Seeing Ourselves as Others See Us: Perceptions of the Church of England (Grove, 2021) — suggested that “benign indifference” was the commonest attitude of the general public to the C of E. “Most people don’t think about us at all,” the author, Stephen Hance, wrote (News, 12 November 2021). That level of indifference was confirmed by a YouGov poll only earlier this month, which found that 78 per cent of those asked didn’t know who the current Archbishop of Canterbury was. Half of those asked said that religious leaders should “keep out of political matters”.

The Church Times has, to date, resisted the temptation to draw up one of those lists of “runners and riders” for Canterbury which readers may have spotted elsewhere. In our view, the focus, for now at least, should surely remain on the Makin report, the survivors, and the lessons learned. It also seems only wise to take some time out, in order to reflect soberly on exactly what sort of leadership a Church in crisis needs. The question what might be required, one quarter of the way through the 21st century, deserves careful thought — before anyone dares to ask who might be equipped to take on that weighty mantle.