The Archbishop of Canterbury has denied presiding over a “secret marriage” between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
In an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Archbishop Justin Welby discussed everything from homosexuality to the cancel culture, and said there was no “secret marriage” that Meghan Markle had told Oprah Winfrey took place before the televised ceremony.
Archbishop Welby said: “I had a number of private and pastoral meetings with the duke and duchess before the wedding. The legal wedding was on the Saturday. I signed the wedding certificate, which is a legal document, and I would have committed a serious criminal offence if I signed it knowing it was false.”
This was in response to controversial claims by the Sussexes that they had been married privately in a secret ceremony before the publicly broadcast ceremony in the chapel of Windsor Castle.
The Archbishop was asked his view on the ongoing controversies around same-sex relationships that re-emerged with the recent CDF ruling against blessing same sex couples. The Archbishop was cautious on the question of the Anglican church’s position, acknowledging that several provinces had embraced same-sex marriages such as in North America, but said: “That led to a church’s moderate sized group going off.”
He spoke frankly about the question of sexual identity: “The key thing, it seems to me, is whether you think that you are defined as a human being: by your sexuality or by your faith in Jesus Christ? My lived experience of finding a few years ago that my father wasn't my father is that where I find my identity is not in DNA or in sexuality or anything else: it is in Christ, it is in who loved me, and I am loved by God. It is essential that the Church demonstrates to each other and to gay people that God is love.”
Speaking about the differences between Anglicans and Catholics on this issue, he said that he was “not going to criticise Catholics, we are not Catholics, they do a lot of their thinking in private: some families, when they have an argument, they go into separate rooms and sulk. Other families, when they have an argument, they stand in the background garden and shout at each other and all the neighbours hear. The Anglicans are of the second group. We do all our arguing in public and it makes us look quite argumentative sometimes.”
He praised Pope Francis as “a real reformist in many, many areas” but one who’s “a reformist in the sense of not wanting to change everything, but to re-establish the primacy of faith in God who reaches out to us and has brought a profound sense of the experience of love and forgiveness and into the world of the God who was human and as we remember this week on Good Friday and on Easter Sunday, who died on the cross and was raised from the dead.
“That sense of the spiritual life is the centre of our being and hope is something that Pope Francis is just under forgiveness, and engaging with people as people is something Pope Francis does most beautifully.”
Archbishop Welby also had strong words on so-called “cancel culture” saying, “We can’t erase the past. It's impossible. We have to learn from it sometimes, often, always. We have to repent of it quite often. But we cannot erase it. The past is a reality. I think cancel culture is a huge threat to the life of the Church. We need to be able to express truths or to express our views, whether they're good or bad.”
The Archbishop did however recognise the problems of “structural racism”, pointing to the Church of England’s own review of its statues and memorials, and said of the idea of a white Jesus: “Well, he wasn’t [white]. It’s a matter of history.”
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