HOW MUCH CAN A REFORMING ARCHBISHOP DO?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 153, 29 May 1942, Page 10

HOW MUCH CAN A REFORMING ARCHBISHOP DO?

"S$¢. Augustine’s New Successor Starts With One Big Advantage"

AS most readers of "The Listener" know, the Churches of New Zealand are busy organising a campaign for Christian Order. It is therefore of interest to note that the selection of Dr. Temple to be Archbishop. .of Canterbury has aroused a great deal of interest throughout the Empire, and in Church circles has started some interesting discussions about the influence of Christians in national affairs. Here is an article written for the "New Statesman" by Sidney Dark, the late editor of the "Church Times," asking how much, in fact, the new Archbishop is likely to achieve.

terbury as a reformer. His appointment to the Primacy is as significant as Sir Stafford Cripps’s appointment to the War Cabinet. In his recentlypublished Penguin Special, he claims to stand in the succession to Maurice and Kingsley and to Westcott, Gore and Scott Holand. He has set out the social wrongs crying aloud for redress, and he has suggested the radical changes that are immediately demanded. But the Archbishop is a Church reformer before he is a social reformer. He is convinced that the Church must put its own house in order before it can exercise any effective influence in the reshaping of society. That conviction is expressed in one of the Malvern Conference findings: There is urgent need that the Church of England should radically reorganise its own economic and administrative system, and so reconstruct this as to make it an expression of unity of purpose and especially of brotherhood in the ministry. Until it does this, its testimony to the world will be blunted. Our sincerity in putting forward our other proposals will be judged, and rightly judged, by the energy with which we take this task in hand. "Scandalous Inequalities" I need not stress here the scandalous inequalities of the economic system. They have been denounced for a generation, and they remain unaltered. Commissions have reported and nothing has been done. It is admitted that many of both the beneficed and unbeneficed clergy are underpaid, and it is clear that they can only receive adequate stipends if the Church’s resources are pooled and the incomes of the higher dignitaries are radically reduced. That would mean interference with the "rights of property," and the parson will, in many D R. TEMPLE goes to Can-

instances, fight to maintain his "parson’s freedom." But Malvern gave another clear lead, and it is not to be ignored that 23 bishops subscribed to its findings. It declared: It is a traditional doctrine of Christendom that property is necessary to \ fullness of personal life; all citizens should be enabled to hold such property as contributes to moral independence and spiritual freedom without impairing that of others; but where the rights of property conflict with the establishment of social justice or the general social welfare, those rights should be over-ridden, modified, or, if need be, abolished. There is no question that social justice and the general welfare of the Church demand a redistribution of its gross income, and if a bill to bring this about were introduced into Parliament by Dr. Temple, it would almost certainly be passed, despite the opposition of certain bishops and cathedral chapters of the incumbents (there are not many of them), who are now paid £1,500 a year for the cure of three or four hundred souls, and of course, of Lord Quickswood. Money From Slums But legislation would not solve the economic problem. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners receive part of their immense income from mining royalties, and what is worse, indirectly from slum properties. Groups of priests with consciences have publicly expressed their horror at the devil’s money being taken to finance the work of the Lord, and the denunciation of the horrors of the slums obviously has comparatively little weight if it comes from men who, though only partially and indirectly, benefit from slum rents, Renunciation is necessary if the Malvern call for economic and industrial reconstruction is to be accepted as @ (Continued on next page)

"Dr. Temple Will Hasten Christian Unity"

(Continued from previous page) serious expression of Christian opinion. It would be no trivial matter with the certainty of a steady fall in voluntary contributions from the laity, but I believe that, if it were proposed by the Archbishop, it would be welcomed by a considerable portion of the clergy. The welcome would be the readier if the Archbishop implemented another of the Malvern proposals which means sacrifice from the laity. This was the suggestion of a Third Order "which would enable men and women to live under a definite discipline and rule while following the ordinary profession of life.’"’ The business of this Third Order would be to quicken the Christian social conscience and to organise Christian support for what Dr. Temple has himself called the Christian revolution. Again I am convinced that, with his leadership, the Third Order would at once attract a large adherence. I say this because of the number of Malvern Groups that have come into existence during the past year. It is significant that these groups have attracted Free Church people and Roman Catholics as well as members of the Church of England. "Unity is Being Reached" % is indeed in the common eagerness that this bad world shall be made better that Christian unity is being reached, and it will assuredly be hastened hy Dr. Temple. He is a definite Churchman with a deep’ regard for the Catholic heritage of the English Church, but he is definitely persona grata with the Nonconformists, and whefe he leads, a great many of them will follow. The administrative reforms in the Church of England, that Malvern asserted are necessary, are not easy to envisage. The canonical government of the Church belongs to the Convocations of Canterbury and York, each with a

House of Bishops and a House of Clergy. The Houses of Clergy consists of exofficio members and elected proctors. As the poorer clergy cannot afford two or three visits a year to London or York, the ordinary incumbents are under-represented and the unbeneficed are not represented at all. The Church Assembly, brought into being by the Life and Liberty Movement, of which Dr. Temple was the leader in the ’twenties, has no jurisdiction in matters of doctrine and order, but is concerned with the more mun‘dane administration. It consists of three Houses, the clergy of the two provinces, with an elected House of Laity which, again necessarily, is made up of. the leisured and well-to*do. I confess that I have not a notion how the Church could have really representative government, and for the moment, that does not matter very much. The Assembly has sometimes been useful and sometimes short-sighted and _ reactionary. Under Dr. Temple’s guidance, its usefulness may be considerably increased. His Larger Vision It will be one of his insistent preoccupations to bring a far larger part of the nation within the Church. Two things are immediately necessary. The services are remote from the common life, and need modernising, and largely because of the failure of the theological college the clergy are too often ill-equipped and _ill-disciplined. There is another big job of work here for the new Primate. What he can do is by no means confined to things ecclesiastical. He is pledged to real education, and where necessary, adequate meals for all children, with vocational training to the age of 18, and he has set out a plan for housing more thorough than anything likely to have occurred to Lord

Reith. Both these good things could be forwarded from his place in the House of Lords. His larger vision of economic security, genuine freedom, land reform, and the limitation of profits for the benefit of the workers may not yet be practical politics, but it is to be remembered that the Fisher Education Act was passed during the last war. Dr. Temple takes his place with the successors of St. Augustine with one big asset. The people both in and outside the Church are sure that he will be the right man in the right place. He will justify that confidence,