Parliament and the law of the Church of England, 1943-74

[A much-abbreviated version of my forthcoming chapter in Thomas Rodger, Philip Williamson and Matthew Grimley (eds.), The Church of England and British politics in the twentieth century (Boydell and Brewer).
UPDATE: this is now published, but not Open Access. In the meantime, I should be happy to share the draft privately.]

In almost all its aspects – liturgical, pastoral, doctrinal – the post-war Church of England was imbricated with the law. A vast body of statute law, built up over centuries, touched the Church, symbolized by the fact that the 1662 Book of Common Prayer had formed an annexe to the Act of Uniformity of the same year, with the effect that its text had statutory authority. This body of law related to strictly ecclesiastical matters and also to many other less spectacular issues involving finance, property and a multitude of other things.

In recent years historians have been interested in the Church of England and the law, but largely in one particular aspect: that of the law on public morality and its piecemeal liberalisation during the late 1950s and the 1960s. The significance of this emptying of the ‘moral law’ of its Christian content has been understood largely in its relation to secularization, whether as cause, consequence or both. (On this, see Michael Ramsey and the Sexual Offences Act 1967).

However, these three decades saw a profound shift in the legal status of the established Church, obscured by the apparently unchanging appearance of the relationship of Church and state. During this period there was no material change in the relationship between the Church and the monarchy; in the place of the bishops in parliament, or the appointment of those bishops in the first place; in crown appointments, of bishops and other church dignitaries.

However, even though the facade of the relationship between Crown, parliament and Church remained unaltered, a host of changes both large and small between 1943 and 1974 combined to hollow out the structure behind that facade. By means of a long sequence of legislation presented to parliament, the state ceded to the Church greater control of its worship and doctrine, the discipline and deployment of its clergy, its organizational structure of parishes, and of its buildings and other property. Taken together, these changes constitute a profound shift in the nature of the Church-state relationship in England.

The House of Commons.
UK Parliament, CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

However, despite the coherent shape the changes take when viewed in retrospect, there was no controlling strategic direction behind them from the leaders of the Church. This is not to say that there was no body of opinion within the Church that desired greater independence; this there certainly was, but it did not hold sway. The period is best understood as one in which several different processes unfolded, according to their own logic and on differing timetables. Each strand of reform implicated each of the others, however, and so the process was iterative and piecemeal, with the effect of one change in the law often being found to demand another.

Three contexts

The immediate context that served to force the Church of England to consider its internal organization with fresh impetus was the effects of the Second World War. Church buildings up and down the land had been damaged or destroyed by enemy bombing; populations had been dispersed from the cities to new areas, which required fresh provision of buildings and clergy; in the countryside, increased mobility, agricultural change, and the closure of village schools all lessened the self-contained nature of the parish. As well as all this, the Church faced an acute financial crisis. The clergy were often in the wrong places, in unsuitable homes, and were paid unequally and often very poorly. There was a need to put the house in order, and this could not but involve the law and parliament.

As the historian Paul Welsby observed, it seems extraordinary that given the immensity of the challenges it faced, the post-war Church of England should also have embroiled itself in the overhaul of its canon law: a process that occupied many hands for two decades, but so it did. A third context was ecumenical contact between the churches, in which the relationship of the Church of England and the law became a complication – if not indeed an obstacle – in moves towards reunion. How could a united church settle its doctrine if the doctrine of one partner was subject to parliamentary approval? How could local schemes of co-operation and sharing of buildings proceed if such re-use of Anglican churches was restricted by the law? At every turn the Church of England was less free to move than the churches with which it was in dialogue.

Church and parliament

At the Church’s request, parliament had in 1919 passed the so-called Enabling Act. The Act provided for the formation of the body that became known as the Church Assembly, in which the Church could decide what it wished to change in the law, and draft ‘measures’ to effect the change, a new kind of legislation by which statute law could be amended or repealed. Yet, it was still for parliament to accept or reject such measures as were presented to it.

Parliament was accustomed to dealing with bills, which passed through several stages and which could be amended before becoming acts. Although the line between the two was not always clear, there was a different procedure for measures. The Ecclesiastical Committee of parliament was made up of fifteen members from each House. In consultation with its counterpart, the Legislative Committee of the Church Assembly, it was to consider each measure brought forward and report on its ‘expediency … especially with relation to the constitutional rights of all His Majesty’s subjects’. Once the report from the Committee was in hand, both houses had the opportunity to accept or reject the measure, but not (crucially, and in contrast to the procedure for bills) to amend it.

Though the personnel changed over time, there was usually a small number of peers and MPs, often themselves members of the Church Assembly or the Ecclesiastical Committee, who spoke on debates on Church measures. In most cases the debates were not long, and the numbers of parliamentarians who voted on them were small, if indeed the houses divided at all. A good share of the measures brought to parliament passed without debate, due not least to the habit of those in charge of parliamentary scheduling of placing these debates late at night, at the very end of the day’s business.

As well as pressure on parliamentary time, there were other reasons why parliament sat loosely to the Church business with which it was asked to deal. One was a reluctance on the part of parliamentarians, both from other Christian churches and from none, to be dealing with what they regarded as essentially private matters of the Church of England. Members affiliated to the other churches in England often expressed their sympathy that Anglicans should have the internal workings of their Church subject to such scrutiny. Chuter Ede, Labour home secretary (but speaking personally, as a Unitarian) thought it ‘an anachronism that still these intimate domestic details of a spiritual entity should be subject to the approval of this House, in which sit Nonconformists, agnostics, atheists, Jews, and persons of the most diverse religious persuasions’. It would, he thought, ‘be to the advantage of the Church herself, and more in keeping with modern views on these matters, if the Church were disestablished’.

MPs from time to time wondered aloud whether it was in fact a rule, or at least a convention, that Anglicans alone ought to speak and vote in such debates. On occasion, there was a similar reticence from Welsh and Scottish MPs, representing constituencies where the Anglican church was not established. As a result, members from outside England spoke relatively infrequently.

Amongst parliamentarians of all parties and of all varieties of churchmanship, there was a constant undertone of discontent with the process that the Enabling Act had put in place. There was frequent disagreement over whether there were any circumstances in which parliament should reject the settled wishes of the Church. Had the spirit of the 1919 Act been that the parliamentary stage should be a final debating stage, akin to the report stage for a bill? Or, was it a mere formality, the application of a rubber stamp (arguably the effect of the words of the Act)? If the latter was the case, and parliament ought never to reject a measure if the Ecclesiastical Committee commended it, why should it spend time debating them? Since parliament was, in effect, presented with nothing concrete to decide, debates were often circuitous and vague, and wandered far from the specific matters at hand.

There was also some discomfort with being asked to approve sometimes lengthy and miscellaneous measures while having no power to amend them: the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction Measure of 1963 ran to some 89 sections. ‘It has been truly said’ argued one Conservative MP in 1944, ‘that Parliament can do anything except turn a man into woman. There is one other thing which it cannot do, and that is amend a Measure brought down from the Church Assembly’. Though parliament had powers to divide measures into shorter ones to be considered individually, they were seldom used. So, objections and concerns were often raised about particular matters, but divisions were not forced, due to a reluctance to send a whole measure back to the Church for the sake of a single section or clause. In an increasing range of cases, parliament was content to rely on assurances given in debate, where once it would have exercised control.

While there was never any significant move to have the Act amended, or even repealed, the discontent with its operation was a constant from the 1920s until well into the 1970s. Though discontent was regularly voiced about the substance of particular measures, there was insufficient pressure in parliament either to reform the process by amending the Act, or to repeal it, or to move in the opposite direction towards a more wholesale freeing of the Church from parliamentary oversight. The effect of this discontent was instead to militate towards greater and greater autonomy by omission. Seeing in the Act a job half-done, parliament (in a fit of absence of mind) completed the job of giving the Church autonomy by a series of small steps.

The sequence of individual measures and bills examined here (passed between 1943 and 1974), more than three dozen in total, when taken as a whole amounted to a highly significant loosening of parliamentary control over the Church. Almost none of them tightened that control; it was a long series of small steps, miscellaneous in themselves, but all in the same direction. Perhaps most well known was the granting of independence in liturgical revision and the settling of doctrine by the Worship and Doctrine Measure of 1974 (which is dealt with in the full version of this article, along with clergy discipline). Here I want to focus on just two out of several aspects of the changes: parishes and people, and money and buildings.

Parishes and people

The physical destruction of the war, and the population shifts to which the bombing gave rise, brought into relief the stability of the parish and the rights of clergy in relation to their bishop, patron, and parishioners. The clergy were not to be regarded as employees, who could be moved from post to post by their managers the bishops; the relative autonomy that their freehold provided was an important component of the parochial system, which was in turn a key part for some of the ordering of English society. A sequence of measures during and immediately after the war seemed to undermine that freehold, and shift the balance of power from the clergyman to his bishop. Some in parliament regarded this as an instance in which constitutional rights – of the clergy themselves – needed to be protected.

The process began innocuously enough, with the New Parishes Measure of 1943, which rationalized the process of creating new parishes and the associated issues of patronage to benefices, land transactions and the like. It passed through both houses of parliament without debate or a division. Hard on its heels, however, was the Reorganisation Areas Measure of 1944. In blitzed areas, there were churches and clergy without populations to which to minister; elsewhere there were displaced people without access to the sacraments or pastoral ministry. The Church needed the powers to reorganize parishes to reflect the change. So much, so efficient; but what of the rights of the incumbent minister in a parish set to disappear? Surely (it was argued) one unwilling minister ought not to be allowed to frustrate the necessary reorganization of a whole area. The measure provided for the expropriation of the rights of incumbents to endowments of property as part of a reorganisation, for which they would be compensated. Though one MP thought it a ‘great constitutional change’, the measure nonetheless passed without a division, late at night with few MPs present.

The process continued with the Pastoral Reorganisation Measure of 1949, which took the freedoms of the 1944 Measure and applied them to the whole country (at the diocesan level), allowing the creation of team ministries in groups of parishes, the equalization of stipends and the better alignment of men with the size of the population. The Labour MP Tom Driberg thought it ‘a decisive further step in the destruction of the parochial system of England’. However, again, the House did not divide and the Measure passed. The Pastoral Measure of 1968 rationalized and extended these powers, and in 1977 the Dioceses Measure took the logical next step by the creation and dissolution of dioceses without reference to parliament.

Money, land and buildings

Among the later measures that passed through parliament were those that related to the freedom of the Church to deal with its monies, lands, and buildings. The same impetus came to bear as with parishes, concerning the ability of the Church to adapt and redirect its resources in line with changing pastoral circumstances. Of these, the issue of monies was the least difficult, and during the earlier part of the period there were a succession of small adjustments in the law, largely unremarked and undisputed, all of which gave the Church greater discretion within the law. Even such minutiae as the Parochial Church Councils (Powers) (Amendment) Measure of 1949 were part of the same process, as it widened the range of activities for the pursuance of which local churches could hold property.

However, in its local context the Church was not only the giver of pastoral care and its buildings places of worship; it was also both a neighbour, and the custodian of buildings about which many people had strong feelings. And many of these disputes had to be settled in Parliament. No-one thought the oversized church of St. Saviour, Paddington was of particular architectural merit; the proposal in 1968 to demolish and replace it was opposed on the ground that it formed part of an architectural whole with the neighbourhood. The 1968 case of St. Mary’s church in the north London suburb of Hornsey exposed the complexities of the law relating to burial grounds. The sale of a disused burial ground belonging to St. George’s, Hanover Square, as building land was opposed in 1964 by local residents as a diminution of the open space in the neighbourhood. In 1968, in the context of increasing ecumenical hopefulness, Mervyn Stockwood, bishop of Southwark, needed to come to parliament for permission to sell a redundant church to local Roman Catholics, in the face of Protestant opposition.

Despite these sensitivities, the bulk of the restrictions were swept away in three pieces of legislation in two years, all of which passed with little difficulty. The Pastoral Measure of 1968 dealt with the issue of churchyards and redundant churches, such that parliament would no longer be called upon to deal with them singly, though the state retained some powers. Despite some unease about placing more matters in the discretion of the bishop, the measure passed both houses without a division. The Redundant Churches and Other Religious Buildings Act of 1969 progressed through parliament in a similarly smooth fashion. The sharing of church buildings with other Christian denominations was enabled by the Sharing of Church Buildings Act of 1969.

Conclusion

The Worship and Doctrine Measure 1974 was by no means the last on which parliament had to adjudicate, or an end to debate about its role. Some in parliament thought that some of the changes of the previous years had been steps too far, and had been allowed to pass too easily, and that there had been a high-handedness in the Church’s exercise of its new freedoms.

Despite this, neither before 1974 nor after was there any concerted attempt from either Church or state to amend or repeal the Enabling Act, whether to streamline the process, to repatriate powers to parliament, or to alienate them entirely. Though dissatisfaction was often expressed with both principle and process, those with the power to instigate fundamental change did not do so.

Despite the semblance of continuity, during the three decades after the Second World War there was a subtle but profound hollowing-out of parliamentary control of the Church of England. The unwieldy and unsatisfactory nature of the process instituted by the Enabling Act left parliament both unsure of its role, and as time went on, increasingly reluctant to perform it. By a sequence of several dozen unco-ordinated but nonetheless related measures and bills, the Church secured greater discretion in the handling of parish organisation, the deployment and discipline of clergy, the management of financial and other assets, not least buildings, and the freedom to determine its own forms of worship and its doctrine. Whatever the term ‘establishment’ had been understood to mean, by 1974 parliament no longer believed that it entailed detailed oversight of the working of the Church.

Review: Archbishop Randall Davidson

Michael Hughes
Archbishop Randall Davidson
Abingdon, Routledge, 2017
978-1-4724-1866-1
vii + 230

[This review appeared a few weeks ago in Reviews in History.]

The series of volumes on the archbishops of Canterbury, which began life with Ashgate and has now passed to Routledge, reaches its eighth volume with that under review from Michael Hughes, which does not disappoint. Randall Davidson is the third of the twentieth century archbishops to be so treated (the 2015 volume on Michael Ramsey was the work of this reviewer), and the book adopts a similar approach to the others. The bulk of the book is taken up with a consideration of Davidson’s tenure as archbishop of Canterbury, which ran from 1903 until his retirement in 1928 at the age of 80. The final section of the book consists of selected primary sources, arranged and annotated to illustrate the themes of the first part of the book.

The volume makes no claim to be a biography of Davidson in the formal sense. George Bell, later bishop of Chichester, was chaplain to Davidson as Davidson himself was to A.C. Tait, and all students of Davidson labour under the shadow of Bell’s massive biography, which went through three editions between 1935 and 1952. Hughes wisely makes no attempt to replicate in 140 pages that which Bell detailed in 1,000 pages, but rightly observes (2-3) that Bell’s work is difficult to use by dint of its length; it is notably discreet about matters that are now usefully laid bare, and the Davidson that emerges from Bell’s account is coloured both by Bell’s closeness to the events described, and the part he himself played in some of them. By and large, as Hughes notes, Davidson has slipped from memory, including that of the Church of England itself (171), his reputation eclipsed by other figures such as William Temple or Michael Ramsey who appeared to make a more spectacular impact. The time is right for a fresh and concise assessment of Davidson as archbishop, which Hughes provides abundantly. Although Davidson seemed to have solved few problems and to have left few permanent monuments to himself in institutional form, Hughes shows that Davidson’s achievement in steering his church through turbulent times is one to be reckoned with. The book will be a useful starting point for studies of Davidson himself, and of the religious history of the period in general, and should be read by established scholars as well.

The introduction outlines Davidson’s progression to Lambeth Palace as a means of explicating his approach to the role. Like many bishops of the Church of England, he was first chaplain to the archbishop (in this case, A.C. Tait, between 1876 and 1883), a role something like a private secretary or executive assistant in other contexts, in which a young clergyman of promise could learn the inner workings of the bureaucracy. Next came six years as dean of Windsor, in which role Davidson became a close confidante of Queen Victoria. This was to continue as first he became bishop of Rochester, and then of Winchester (1895), in which diocese lay the royal residence of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. These connections – with the Queen, with successive archbishops, and with the political class as they met in Parliament and in the gentlemen’s clubs of London – meant that when archbishop Frederick Temple died in office at the end of 1902, Davidson was the obvious choice to receive the nomination of Prime Minister Balfour. The word ‘courtier’ was used of him as the appointment was announced, and not kindly (p.29), but although the term captured something important of the circles in which he moved, it implied a subservience that Hughes shows was not characteristic of Davidson as archbishop.

In his 1971 survey of the archbishops of Canterbury, Edward Carpenter, dean of Westminster, described Davidson as ‘the last of the Victorians’. Hughes takes up this theme, which permeates the book: of Davidson as a Victorian figure confronted with great changes both within the Church of England and in the nation at large. Within the Church, Davidson had to deal with tensions between the Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical wings of the Church and the challenge of maintaining discipline, using the device of a Royal Commission to dampen down the heat generated by the issue of irregularity in public worship. Davidson was reluctant to create what became the 1922 Commission on Christian doctrine to investigate the issues raised by ‘Modernism’ in theology; he doubted that it could be constituted in a way that could command trust across the whole spectrum of opinion, and feared that the most likely result was greater discord rather than less. Hughes shows that although he could identify the issues that were at stake, Davidson was temperamentally incapable of grasping the depth of feeling that such questions provoked in others. Few accused Davidson of partisanship; rather more, indeed, wished for greater firmness and a clearer conviction. But there was a conviction in Davidson, despite what some thought: that most issues of controversy could be dealt with by calm, patient reasonable men if they were only able and prepared to set aside their own self-interest; there were few things worth fighting over. It was a remarkable achievement to have steered the revised Book of Common Prayer through the decision-making processes of the Church, given that (as Davidson himself noted) there were those ‘who have given their thoughts to the structure of a service which to many of them means more than anything else on earth.’ (158) However, Davidson’s shock when Parliament rejected the revised Book as a threat to Protestant England showed that, even if he could conceive intellectually that such feelings might exist, they were beyond him fully to understand.

This was not merely obtuseness or a failure of empathy on Davidson’s part, however. If it is legitimate to speak of Davidson as Victorian in his theology, it was in his faith that human understanding of Christian truth was progressive, unitary, and the product of consensus and goodwill. Generations of younger men than Davidson thought there were more fundamental issues at stake that needed to be named and pursued to a conclusion: for these, division was sometimes a necessary price to pay for truth. Davidson’s commitment to the comprehensiveness of the Church of England was a Realist one, in that he doubted that strong views on the definiteness of this or that issue were much more than hubris; the wise person knew that their own sense of truth was likely to be partial and fallible, and that they should act accordingly. (169)

What of the Church and the society and nation around it? Successive archbishops have intervened in national affairs to a greater or lesser extent, and Hughes’ account reveals Davidson as rather more reticent to appear ‘political’ than his successor William Temple (already bishop of Manchester from 1921), or Michael Ramsey rather later. He was most comfortable when intervening in matters that might be termed strictly ‘moral’, such as the broadening of the grounds for divorce in the Matrimonial Causes Bill of 1920 (139), or the use of poison gas or reprisals against civilian targets during the 1914-18 war. He was rather less prepared to commit himself publicly on other issues, such as women’s suffrage or foreign affairs. This was in part due to a reluctance to speak on issues of which he did not have a detailed knowledge, and the Church of England did not yet have staff whose role it was to formulate a position on this or that issue of the day (that structure was to be erected later). It was also partly because Davidson thought that to appear too ‘political’ was likely to damage the position of the Church; the Church’s influence was greatest in private, and the channels through which it might be exerted might well close to him should his public voice be too definite. Davidson thus tried to mediate in relation to Irish Home Rule, and offered to do the same during the coal strike of 1921. His fears were confirmed when he called for simultaneous concessions from both sides in the General Strike of 1926 and was vilified for his pains. More fundamentally, Davidson’s cast of mind was not systematic, not given to abstract analysis of social forces: if there were social problems, he tended to see them in terms of the failings of individuals which could be amended by persuasion and renewed personal effort. He was largely impervious to the more systematic analysis of social and economic systems that fired Temple and others exercised by the ‘social gospel’.

This pragmatic, concrete tendency in Davidson’s thought is most visible in his understanding of the relationship between church and state, which was thrown in such confusion during the Prayer Book Crisis. It would be too easy to dismiss Davidson as subservient, a mere member of the ‘Conservative party at prayer’ (to use the phrase of Maude Royden). In private, Davidson was often ready to press politicians on a moral course of action, and also to defend the interests of the Church itself against the state. As in the case of his support for the restraint of the House of Lords in the Parliament Act of 1911, he was wise enough to realise that it was not possible to hold out against all efforts at change. But his whole career was conditioned by an attachment to the place of the Church within the constitution. For Davidson, there was a givenness to the Establishment of the Church, based on his reading of the evolutionary character of English history; he thought it also of positive benefit to both church and state that they should be so related. But in 1927-8 the state, in the shape of the House of Commons, exercised what were undoubtedly its powers in law to override what was taken to be a tacit agreement that the Church should be in fact be independent in the matter of its worship. Davidson’s whole career had been spent in the quiet maintenance of a fine balance between the church and the state, based on tacit understandings developed over centuries. As Hughes notes, ‘such unwritten rules only had authority as long as they were acknowledged by those to whom they supposedly applied’ (163). Davidson was the ecclesiastical consensus politician par excellence. By the time he retired, such consensus was in short supply in British public life. Within weeks he had resigned.

All this is expertly described with concision, and no little elegance, and Hughes’ judgments are measured yet telling. It is no pleasure, however, to report that the transition of the series from Ashgate to Routledge has coincided with a marked reduction in the quality of the book as an object. The print quality is frankly poor and the increased amount of text on each page gives the whole a cramped feeling. Footnotes are placed at the end of each chapter, surely the least usable referencing method of the many available. All serious libraries for history and theology will wish to have a copy, which is just as well since the astonishing price of £105 surely puts the volume out of the reach of practically all individual readers, while others in the series have a paperback edition at a quarter of the price. This is a shame, since Michael Hughes’ fresh and convincing rendering of an important figure deserves a wide readership.

The Church of England and learning disability, 1945-1990

My paper for this year’s Ecclesiastical History Society conference.

The Church of England and learning disability, 1945 – 1990

The full text of the paper, as read, is available here.

Church Times review of Archbishop Ramsey

Ramsey - coverPerhaps not surprisingly, the first review of my book on Michael Ramsey comes from the Church Times, in the issue of 31 July. The reviewer is Graham James, bishop of Norwich, to whom my thanks are due. Read the full review (PDF).

As is the case with most reviews, James points out a factual error, where I have indeed misnamed a theological college (or rather, applied a later name change to an earlier period). I rather think that if this was my worst mistake, I should think I had done quite well. More interesting are some points of interpretation of subsequent Anglican history, which I mention here.

James quite rightly notes a mismatch between the memoirs of archbishops and those of the politicians with whom they interacted, where evidence of influence is as absent in the latter as it is present in the former. He asks whether this is self-delusion on the part of ecclesiastics, or an attempt to downplay influence on the part of politicians, in memoirs often written at a later point in time. I suspect the answer is something of both.

One of the central burdens of the book is that, as Ramsey sought and gained greater autonomy from the state while overseeing the emptying of the moral law of its Christian content, there opened up a space and an opportunity for the Church of England to discover a more prophetic role for itself, speaking the truth to power from a greater distance. James, I think correctly, notes that “it has never emerged, except, perhaps, in the Runcie years under an archbishop rather at home with the Establishment.” There remains a whole new research project into why the Church of England didn’t grasp the opportunity.

James also suggests that one of the results of the greater autonomy of the church to make its own decisions was that “the Church of England became increasingly captive to its own internal political factions. Ramsey seems to have been innocent to this possibility…… His grasp of ecclesiastical politics was immeasurably weaker, and his interest even less. We suffer from the consequences still.”  Certainly the General Synod can be partisan, as more recent transactions such as those over the ordination of women bishops show. But so could the Church Assembly be that preceded the Synod, and a great deal less efficient with it. One would hope that no-one would seriously now argue that the Church of England needs Parliament to help mediate when it can’t make up its own mind (which is what this view seems to me to imply.) If there is partisanship, it isn’t the fault of the Synod as an apparatus, but is about people and culture and an endemic lack of trust between members of the same church. I don’t think Ramsey could have done much to change that, at least.

 

Editing Michael Ramsey’s writings

The second half of this book on Archbishop Michael Ramsey consists of a selection of edited sources. As I now have a full first draft of these, I thought I’d publish the list here.

There may yet be some changes to this, with some of the sources listed making way for others. Comments on the selection are very welcome.

Apart from the speeches to the House of Lords, all of these are edited afresh from unpublished items in the Ramsey Papers at Lambeth Palace Library. I would be happy to supply readers with the full reference(s) on request.

Date Subject Type
1961 To Bishops’ Meeting on liturgical revision Memo
1961 Speech to a Congress on Public Morality Address
1962 Letter to parliamentarians on liturgical reform Letter
1962 On the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill Parliament
1963 At Lambeth Palace requiem for Pope John Address
1963 To Mervyn Stockwood on Honest to God Letter
1963 To the bishops on Honest to God Letter
1963 To Mervyn Stockwood on Honest to God Letter
1963 To a parish priest, on Honest to God Letter
1963 To Convocation on the Anglican Congress in Toronto Address
1964 Rapprochement of Orthodox & Anglican churches Sermon
1965 To the Prime Minister on the Church and State Commission Letter
1965 On abolition of the death penalty Parliament
1965 On the Sexual Offences Bill Parliament
1965 Magna Carta Service Sermon
1965 On Southern Rhodesia Parliament
1966 On the canonisation of the English RC martyrs Memo
1966 To Oliver Tomkins on Anglican-Roman Catholic relations Letter
1966 To E.L. Mascall on Rome Letter
1966 To Chad Varah on sex Letter
1967 On the meeting with Cardinal Suenens at Lambeth Memo
1967 On the commencement of Human Rights Year Sermon
1968 To Margaret Deanesly on Anglican-Methodist unity Letter
1968 On reform of the House of Lords Parliament
1968 On the admission of Kenyan Asians Parliament
1968 On the Race Relations Bill Parliament
1968 At the opening of the Lambeth Conference Sermon
1969 To David L. Edwards on Anglican-Methodist unity Letter
1969 To Eric Kemp on Anglican-Methodist unity Letter
1969 Foreword to pamphlet introducing the new General Synod Publication
1969 At a quincentenary commemoration of Guru Nanak Address
1971 On Northern Ireland Parliament
1972 Prayer for Ireland: Westminster Cathedral Sermon
1974 On the Worship and Doctrine Measure Parliament
1974 Farewell Sermon Sermon
1982 British Council of Churches: 40th Anniversary Service Sermon