COMMUNION AND WOMEN

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20003, 31 July 1939, Page 3

COMMUNION AND WOMEN

LIPSTICK NOT A BAR POWERS OP A BISHOP SYDNEY, July 6. According to the principal of Moore Theological College, the Rev. T. C. Hammond, a clergyman who refused a woman Holy Communion because she used lipstick would lay himself open to an action at civil law for defamation of character. Mr. Hammond was commenting on the direction by the Anglican Bishop of Willochra to his clergy that women ancl girls who used lipstick should not present themselves for Holy Communion in his diocese.

“An Anglican bishop has no power to direct his clergy to refuse Communion to anyone,’’ said Mr. Hammond. “Tire administration of Communion is governed by the Prayer Book rubrics, which provide for its refusal only to a person who is ‘an open and notorious evil liver,’ or to those ‘betwixt whom the curate perceiveth malice and hatred to reign.’ "By no stretch of imagination can the use of lipstick—distasteful as it is to some of us —be classed as notorious evil living, and a girl excluded from Communion who cared to make a test ease would probably have a very good case.” Mr, Hammond cited a case in the English courts, in which a man named Bannister, who had married his deceased wife's sister, had been refused Communion on that ground, had won an action against the clergyman for defamation of character, The diocesan registrar, Archdeacon Johnstone, said that while many clergy disapproved of the use of lipstick by Communicants, there had been no complaint in the Sydney diocese. No clergyman, whatever his private preferences, would consider the use of lipstick an offence against morality, added the Archdeacon.