His first full day was spent visiting an Anglican church in Amman and the Zaatari camp, near the border with Syria, which is home to about 80,000 refugees.
"By way of subtext," he notes in passing, "I visited all 41 (Anglican) cathedrals and lit a candle to my late son in each".
Welby, who visited all 38 Anglican provinces within the communion in the two years after his enthronement, telephoned each leader from his French holiday home last summer to persuade them to take part in the primates' meeting.
Men like him had come through our house from time to time to visit my father, an Anglican bishop in a small city in the east of England.
Although the archbishop has visited the best-known Anglican shrine in England, at Walsingham, Norfolk, Lourdes' status and character has often aroused Protestant suspicion.
That contrast between the congregants' modesty and the issues of gender and sexuality absorbing church leaders seems to underline a sense that the Anglican elite and the rank-and-file churchgoers have, like the scriptural Magi after visiting with the infant Jesus, left by different routes.
In 1965 Anglican archbishop Michael Ramsey visited Romania to present Justinian with the Lambeth Cross for his contributions to Christian unity.
During the visit, Archbishop Welby met fellow Anglican bishops and visited holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount or Haram al-Sharif.
If I wish to visit it, I pass through six Anglican parishes on the way, to say nothing of at least 14 other parishes within a 10-mile radius of that establishment.
In July, for instance, Truro was host of a visit by five Anglican archbishops from Africa, Asia and Australia, including Peter Akinola of Nigeria.
