‘As you walk with God, you are also accompanied by people’: Archbishop Mullally completes pilgrimage

Archbishop Mullally will be installed at Canterbury Cathedral on 25 March with more than 2,000 people in attendance, including Archbishop of Westminster Richard Moth reading a lesson.

Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally arrived in Canterbury on foot on 22 March to bells and cheers, after a 6-day pilgrimage from London.

She said the pilgrimage had been a “real joy” and that “it’s also a joy to know that we’re done”, and thanked fellow pilgrims and other well-wishers for their support.

Archbishop Mullally walked along the Becket Camino, the historic pilgrimage route that Archbishop of Canterbury St Thomas Becket is believed to have taken, along stretches of the Thames Path, the Via Britannica and the Augustine Camino.

Along the way, she stopped at schools, religious communities, and churches. She also prayed for those affected by the meningitis outbreak in Kent, and found the time to attend services and talk to schoolchildren even while walking more than 40 kilometres a day.

It is the first time in modern history that an Archbishop of Canterbury has undertaken this pilgrimage ahead of their installation.

The pilgrimage to Canterbury was one of the most popular pilgrimage routes in medieval Britain, and it is estimated that up to 100,000 pilgrims travelled to the shrine of St Thomas Becket in a single year during its peak.

During the English Reformation, Thomas Cromwell banned “wandering to pilgrimages” in 1538, and the practice has never fully recovered in Britain since, although some signs of a resurgence have been seen in recent years.

Archbishop Mullally said it was an opportunity to reflect on her ministry and her journey from London to Canterbury.

“It was Becket’s journey as well – he was born at Cheapside, stopped at Southwark Cathedral, and then on to Canterbury,” she said. “I’m not the first Archbishop who’s done it, I’m joining footsteps from the past.”

Dean David Monteith and Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin joined the group of pilgrims for the final stretch of their journey from Chartham to Canterbury, where they were welcomed by the Lord Mayor, before walking together through the city and finishing their journey at Canterbury Cathedral.

Archbishop Mullally reflected that, “On any pilgrimage, you do it with people, and as you walk with God and into God you are also accompanied by people. There is a need to depend on them, and to accept as well as to give.”

She said there is “the sense of relying on God, wherever the path takes you” and that it was also an “opportunity to reflect on the diversity of the country and its people, for the life that exists which is so varied, for the different environments, different people”.

Dr Guy Hayward, director of the British Pilgrimage Trust, who joined Archbishop Mullally for part of the pilgrimage, observed, “In a world defined by speed, screens and digital ‘connection’, pilgrimage offers the opposite: time for the slowness of shared, lived memories to unfold through moving and feeling with our bodies.” 

The British-Nigerian poet Sir Ben Okri called Archbishop Mullally’s journey “radical” and “doubly moving”: “Dame Sarah is not only the first woman to ascend to that position, she is also restoring the spirit of ritual and reminding people of the difference between a life of purpose and a life of distraction”.

The environmental activist Satish Kumar said it was “a testament of humility and renewal in the spirit of pilgrimage” and a reminder that “we need to live as pilgrims rather than tourists”.

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