Religion: Anglican Dilemma

For centuries the Church of England has been tied, in one way or another, to the British state. The King, as titular head of the Church, still nominally appoints bishops and deans; Parliament must pass on the smallest change in the Book of Common Prayer; ecclesiastical court cases may be appealed to civil courts. Such a state of affairs was once natural enough. But many a modern Englishman now asks: is it suitable in a modern socialist state?

Last week an answer came from a high quarter: England’s second-ranking prelate, the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Cyril Forster Garbett, Archbishop of York. Wrote the 72-year-old Archbishop in his new book, The Claims of the Church of England: There is at present a “tendency towards totalitarianism in the State. The State increasingly exercises control over every department of the life of the community. It is not likely that the Church will escape from this movement. Through the appointment of bishops, deans and through the patronage of many benefices, it would be possible for the State to control the Church for its own purposes.. ..”

These were not the views of a socialist-baiting Tory. First as vicar of Portsea, then as bishop of South London’s slum-ridden Southwark district, Dr. Garbett learned a great deal about what life is like among the poor; as an enthusiastic sponsor of his Church’s famed, leftish Malvern program in wartime, he won the hearts of Anglican liberals.

The Archbishop conceded that “at the moment, Parliament has no desire to exercise active control over the Church”; but until it begins making efforts to extricate itself from the Government’s centuries-old embrace, he said, “the Church is drifting towards disaster.”

To reconcile religious freedom with Establishment (the Church’s traditional status as the national church), York suggests four reforms: 1) legislation by which the Crown could allow changes in worship without consulting Parliament; 2) Church courts from which appeal to the civil courts could be made “only when the ecclesiastical courts had failed to observe [their own] rules”; 3) a grant to the Church of the right to be consulted in the appointment of its chief officers (it is ordinarily consulted now as a courtesy and for guidance); 4) legislation allowing Church Convocations to frame and enact new canons (church laws).

Freedom at a Price. If the Church and Parliament cannot agree on such a compromise, wrote the Archbishop, “then Disestablishment and Disendowment will be unavoidable.” Disestablishment would mean the end of the formal relationship of Church & State which began when Henry VIII repudiated papal authority, and the Convocation of 1534 resolved that the Pope had no more divine jurisdiction in England than “any other foreign bishop.”

York tempered his pronouncement with a word or two of archepiscopal caution. For one thing, confiscation of State endowments would deal the Church a grave financial blow. Far worse, Disestablishment “would be regarded, however illegitimately, as the national repudiation of religion.” Further, the Archbishop cited what Poet-Essayist T. S. Eliot wrote in The Idea of a Christian Society: “The very act of disestablishment separates [a church] more definitely and irrevocably from the life of the nation than if it had never been established.”