Faith in the City

New resources in Lambeth Palace Library

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In what has become a traditional annual post, here are some highlights from the Lambeth Palace Library annual review, just published.

For those interested in modern ecumenical history, recently catalogued are the files from the Church of England’s Council for Foreign Relations relating to Roman Catholic national churches in several European countries, including Austria, Belgium and France. A recent accession (but not yet catalogued) are the records of the Nikaean Club, set up by Archbishop Davidson in 1925 to promote ecumenical relations.

Two other things also caught my eye in particular. Papers relating to Terry Waite, Robert Runcie’s special envoy to the Middle East who spent five years in captivity after being kidnapped in Beirut in 1987, are now available. Most intriguing are the papers of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, which issued in the controversial Faith in the City report in 1985, also now catalogued and available.

New sources at Lambeth Palace Library

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A recent arrival on the doormat was the annual review of Lambeth Palace Library. It includes as always a digest of recent accessions and completed cataloguing, and here are some of the highlights for historians of the period since 1945.

The rolling cataloguing of the papers of the archbishops continues, under the usual thirty-year rule, with those for Robert Runcie now available for 1982. These include papers relating to the famous sermon of July 1982 at the Falkland Island Service, and for the visit of Pope John Paul II. Also available are the collected speeches and sermons of George Carey, some thousand or more of them.

Particularly interesting in connection with Michael Ramsey are the papers of the Church of England’s diplomatic arm, the Council on Foreign Relations, as they relate to the Roman Catholic church. There is material here on Ramsey’s visit to Rome in 1966, the vexed issue of ‘mixed marriages’ and the canonisation by the Pope of forty English and Welsh martyrs of the Reformation period, which Ramsey thought an ecumenical disaster, and against which he pressed in public and in private.

Also available are the papers of the prominent member of the Church Assembly George Goyder, as well as those of Garth Moore, canonist, cleric and academic lawyer, who was prominent in many of the complex legal changes in relation to church and state and the ecumenical movement in Ramsey’s time at Lambeth.

Other highlights are the paper of Hugh Montefiore, bishop of Birmingham; and the records of Robert Runcie’s Commission on Urban Affairs, which produced the controversial and still significant report Faith in the City, which endeared the church to Mrs Thatcher about as much as the Falklands sermon did.

The archives and manuscripts catalogue is available here.