The new archbishop of Wales, the Most Rev Cherry Vann, has said that gay marriage in church is inevitable.
Vann, 66, stated this while speaking to the Guardian of how she kept her sexuality secret for decades as part of her struggle to be accepted as a female minister in the Anglican communion.
Vann became one of the first female priests to be ordained in England in 1994. Now, she is UK’s first female and first openly gay archbishop, and the first openly lesbian and partnered bishop to serve as a primate within the Anglican communion.
She said that without the strong belief that God had called her to the priesthood she “would not have survived” her journey through the ranks of the church.
“It happens that I’ve lived in a time that’s meant that I’m a trailblazer, but I’m not a campaigner,” the Leicestershire-born archbishop said during an interview at the Church in Wales’s offices in central Cardiff,” she said.
“I’m not somebody to be out there all the time but I do seek to be true to what I think God’s asking of me.”
Working in the Church in Wales since 2020 has been very different from the many years Vann spent at the Church of England, she said, as clergy are permitted to be in same-sex civil partnerships. In the Anglican church in England, same-sex relationships are technically allowed, but gay clergy are expected to remain celibate
Upon becoming bishop of Monmouth five years ago, Vann publicly disclosed her civil partnership with Wendy Diamond, her partner of 30 years, for the first time.