Sarah Mullally began life as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury by getting heckled. It was the middle of a dull legal ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral on a crisp January morning. A lawyer in a gown and wig was reciting the formal declaration that confirmed Mullally’s appointment: 

“And given that no person has appeared in opposition…” 

“I did!” shouted someone from the pews.

Mullally sat in her robes with a fixed smile as the cameras zoomed in. The heckler, a retired Anglo-Catholic priest, was ushered out and the rest of the ceremony unfolded exactly as the church would have wanted it to. There were processional orders, choirs and a stirring anthem by Elgar. Some local schoolchildren gave a reading, as did an alderman of the City of London, who did not blink as he declared that “all gold is but a little sand in her sight” in a gold-ribbed cloak and heavy gold chain. The Archbishop of Canterbury is appointed by the monarch—head of the Church of England since Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic church in 1534. Mullally swore an oath of allegiance to King Charles and his heir, Prince William, who is by all accounts a reluctant churchgoer (his Sunday rituals reportedly consist mainly of children’s rugby matches).

The service showed the church at its most pompous, its most scripted, its most self-assured. But beneath the spectacle were some uncomfortable truths. The Church of England is deeply fractured. Mullally, once the most senior nurse in the National Health Service, has been chosen to heal it, but may be powerless to do more than administer palliative care. The days of George Orwell’s old maids hiking to holy communion in the morning mist are long gone. The church has been in a drawn-out crisis for decades: a collapse in the number of churchgoers, hundreds of child-abuse cases and increasingly hostile battles between liberals and conservatives.