Archbishop Welby's Deadly Dilemma

The Archbishop of Canterbury was lost for words as he stood beside a mass grave. The bodies of two dozen murdered men and women lay at his feet in bags. The stench of death was in his nostrils, in 40C heat. Those who loved the slain were in tears. “All you could really do was to weep with them,” says the Most Revd Justin Welby, describing the most harrowing moment of a five-day trip to Africa that he made with his wife, Caroline, earlier this year. “It was hugely painful.”

His throat tightens and his voice becomes clipped as he remembers that day in Bor, a remote town in wartorn South Sudan. Today we are in the back of a car driven by Caroline, passing through the English countryside on the way to Canterbury. This short, trim, bespectacled man looks thoroughly unremarkable in a dark suit and black shirt and says that without the dog collar he can easily go unnoticed in a crowd. “I suspect I have a fairly forgettable face.”

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