Monarchy and Legislature

Women's ordination raised issues of conscience across church traditions. The Church of England's statutory legal framework prevented these issues being confined to the Church; they were also played out in parliamentary debate. The interface between law and conscience has, however, considerable historical and contemporary resonance, as well as sound theological pedigree. This article therefore considers the place of conscience in legal and philosophical thought before the Enlightenment. It looks at norms of conscience in Roman Catholic and Church of England liturgical use. On a broader canvas, it looks at the interplay between thought, conscience and religion in human rights case law. The article suggests that a consensus of thought which sees the dictates of conscience as founded in, and inseparable from, the teachings of religion begins to break down in the early seventeenth century. Yet human rights courts find themselves deciding cases of conscience or religion where conscience and religion are often intertwined and where the external manifestation of one is governed by the inner promptings of the other. Such difficulties are not limited to the human rights courts but also play out in debates pertaining to ordination. While the North American churches sought to deal with issues of conscience head on, the Church of England very carefully avoided the language of conscience in its early discussions of women's ordination, conscious, it seems, of a lack of consensus around its meaning and source. As the women's ordination debates developed, arguments of conscience were often deployed more by those opposed to the move than those who supported it. Conscience became as much the locus of pain caused by another's action as it was an inner faculty for self-guidance. Its valence shifted from an intellectual to an emotional category.

Bob Morris' comment on the Succession to the Crown Bill invites the Church of England to ‘fresh, bound-breaking’ thinking about Church of England establishment in light of the role of the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and the statutory obligation for the Sovereign to maintain communion with the Church of England. Along with other writers he argues that, in effect, this leaves us with religious freedom in the UK but not religious equality. I hope that Morris' challenge will stimulate such fresh thought – my response is not yet this but concerns another matter that he raises in relation to Roman Catholic marriages. He repeats concern in both Houses of Parliament that children of ‘mixed marriages’ are obliged to be brought up as Roman Catholics, and he correctly questions the extent of such an absolute obligation contra an article in the Catholic Herald.

Reviewed by: Yorick’s Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne W.B. Gerard (bio) Martha F. Bowden. Yorick’s Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne. University of Delaware Press. 291. US $57.50 Perhaps more so than for other mid-eighteenth-century prose writers, the relationship between Sterne, his work, and his profession presents a literary and biographical puzzle. While we could see elements of the perfectionist editor in Richardson’s work, of dramatic flair and legal training in Fielding’s, and of the surgeon in Smollett’s, Sterne the clergyman and Sterne the (sometimes bawdy) writer seem to inhabit opposite poles. Some recent critics preferred to dismiss the possibility of Sterne’s piety in favour of more exciting and less laborious hypotheses, making the vicar a closet atheist, an existentialist, a postmodernist. This situation has persisted over the last fifty years, despite scattered and intense efforts by Arthur H. Cash, Lansing Van Der Heyden Hammond, Melvyn New, Donald R. Wehrs, J.T. Parnell, and others. The scope of Martha F. Bowden’s Yorick’s Congregation in a sense defines the extent of the infrequently visited aspects of Sterne’s relationship to eighteenth-century Anglicanism as well as its practice, often misunderstood (even by literary scholars) in the twenty-first century. Her volume maps out an ambitious historical and ecclesiastic program, which includes discussion of Sterne’s clerical family, the role played by churches in eighteenth-century communities, contemporary perspectives on Sterne the preacher, the influence of women and Roman Catholicism on Anglicanism, and a reframing of the theoretical and practical religious contexts of Sterne’s major work, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Sterne’s own life is, of course, a rich confluence of Anglican influences, and Bowden weaves together family tradition and Sterne’s own clerical practice to produce a convincing composite portrait of Sterne the churchman. This is the picture of a man devoted to his profession and utterly at home in his time, the great-grandson of the Archbishop Richard Sterne, a national hero during the English Civil War. Biographers have not been quick to draw parallels between the two men, yet Bowden finds a fascinating parallel between the casual attitude of Richard’s statue at York Cathedral and the iconic image of Laurence painted by Reynolds, and we are left to ponder what Sternean whimsies the archbishop may have had up his lawn sleeves. We are reminded here, as in other recent sombre assessments of Sterne’s theological and political place in the church, just how conventional a clergyman he was for his time, an assessment further reinforced by [End Page 252] the inclusion of three of his sermons in William Rose’s popular collection, The Practical Preacher. Placing his work within this contemporaneous context goes a long way toward grounding the historic persona of Sterne the preacher, who after all was neither Yorick nor what his worst critics claimed, but a sincere Latitudinarian and gifted rhetorician. Illuminating aspects of Anglican practice in Sterne’s time, Bowden performs the invaluable service of making these historically distant habits at once near and familiar. This volume is peppered with details fleshing out Georgian Anglicanism that may surprise twenty-first-century churchgoers and scholars (for instance, hymns were not sung during services until the nineteenth century, and vicar is derived from the Latin for substitute). The Book of Common Prayer and the catechism become unexpectedly influential in the Shandean world. Less surprising is Sterne’s apparent anti-Catholicism and the signal shift of Yorick’s befriending the monk Lorenzo in A Sentimental Journey, but the summary is useful nonetheless. The most immediate bounty throughout for literary critics is suggested by a multitude of parallels between Sterne’s fictional world and Bowden’s newly detailed understanding of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. Viewed through this lens, the issues of birth, marriage, and death – core themes of Tristram Shandy – are thrown into distinct relief, and we find ourselves suddenly more familiar with Sterne’s characters: Mrs Shandy, for example, sheds some of her mystery when we view her as ‘closely tied to the rhythms and concerns of her community.’ From...

On 2 February 1932, Alan Don, chaplain to the Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordan Lang, recorded in his diary the simple entry: ‘Church Assembly – not very invigorating’.1 This has been the tenor of the relationship between the English and the governing bodies of the church for centuries. This article seeks to describe the role of synodality at the regional level2 by reference to the General Synod of the Church of England, with a brief comparative study of the tikanga system in New Zealand, and asks the question whether the procedures meet the expectation of synodality.

This chapter presents the results of a comprehensive and in-depth interview process involving women in the senior posts of Archdeacon, Theological Educator and Cathedral Dean in the Church of England, and tries to discover something about how they construe or make meaning of their leadership roles. The Canons of the Church of England lay down, succinctly, the legal requirements for those in senior positions. The possible admission of women to the orders of deacon, priest and bishop was explored in a Church Assembly report of 1966. Women who get to senior positions in the church are often in a dilemma. Most have had previous significant management/leadership experience in the church or in other professions. Being trustworthy and having integrity in relationships was the most important personal characteristic in the exercise of leadership. The empirical research uses a method of interviewing called Repertory Grids, derived from a theory of personality proposed by George Kelly known as Personal Construct Psychology.

That the Church of England was an active and public supporter of homosexual law reform during the long debate on the issue in England between 1957 and 1967 is reasonably well known. It released reports and documents justifying and arguing for decriminalisation, and its bishops in the House of Lords were among those voting in favour in 1965. In this article, relying upon archival materials that have been only rarely used, I demonstrate that the Church's support went much deeper than is often assumed. Beginning in 1952, a process of theological reconsideration and behind the scenes lobbying lead by a relatively small group of thinkers made the Church an initiator in the reform process. Relying upon Rochon's notion of a “critical community,” I offer a description and explanation for the Church's role.

Since the 1950s, historians of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Church of England have generally maintained that the Sacramental Test Act (1828), the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829) and the Reform Act (1832) amounted to a ‘constitutional revolution’, in which Anglican political hegemony was decisively displaced. This theory remains the dominant framework for understanding the effect of legislation on the relationship between church and state in pre-Victorian England. This article probes the validity of the theory. It is argued that the legislative reforms of 1828–32 did not drastically alter the religious composition of parliament, which was already multi-denominational, and that they incorporated clauses which preserved the political dominance of the Church of England. Additionally, it is suggested that Anglican apprehensions concerning the reforming measures of those years were derived from an unfounded belief that these reforms would ultimately result in changes to the Church of England's formularies or in disestablishment, rather than from the actual laws enacted. Accordingly, the post-1832 British parliamentary system did not in the short term militate against Anglican interests. In light of this reappraisal, these legislative reforms may be better understood as an exercise in ‘constitutional adjustment’ as opposed to a ‘constitutional revolution’.

Journal Article Clergymen: Church of England: Roman Catholic Get access J. B. McGovern J. B. McGovern 1St. Stephen's Rectory, C.-on-M., Manchester Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s12-VI, Issue 109, 15 May 1920, Page 217, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s12-VI.109.217c Published: 15 May 1920

This study employs path analysis to examine the strength of Evangelical and Catholic Anglican churches in England in three samples: 1,553 churches in villages and rural communities, 983 churches in urban communities and 584 churches in suburban communities. The data demonstrate the comparative strength of Evangelical churches and the comparative weakness of Catholic churches in all three environments. These findings confirm recent theoretical discussions which have characterised Evangelicals to be on the move and Catholics to be in crisis.

In common with other churches of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Church of England identified its own worship with that of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and of the early Church. In the aftermath of Queen Mary’s restoration of Catholicism, the Church of England’s liturgical identity was also dominated by a severe Puritan reaction against all Catholic forms. In the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, however, an ‘avant-garde’ of clergy emerged committed to greater ceremonialism in worship according to the Book of Common Prayer. The Laudian high churchmanship that emerged from this beginning was a movement in tension, looking simultaneously to the Patristic Church, the pre-Reformation Church in England (with a strong strain of ‘gothic survivalism’) and the even more risky world of the continental baroque. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Church of England was conscious of affinities with the Gallican, nationalist tradition in the French Church, but at either end of this period the Tridentine baroque would also prove seductively fascinating to many Anglicans. The use of the chancel screen was frequently a touchstone of this debate.While the Gallican tradition was effectively submerged within Roman Catholicism by the French Revolution and the First Vatican Council, the tension between the ‘Gallican’ and ‘Tridentine’ tendencies within Anglican high churchmanship remains alive to this day. In the nineteenth century, influential Anglican converts to the Church of Rome brought with them their contrasting convictions about the appropriate architectural setting for the liturgy. The architect A. W. N. Pugin, firmly committed to liturgical Gallicanism, advocated medieval music, architecture and Sarum ceremonial, while John Henry Newman and his fellow Oratorians insisted on an ultramontane liturgy and architecture. Through the creation of the Anglican Ordinariate within the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican tradition continues to bear witness to the diversity of the Catholic tradition.

The spiritual elements that were present in Haworth Parsonage can be viewed as microcosmic representations of religious currents in Britain from 1800 to 1850. These movements transformed the life of the Established Church; created a major new Nonconformist community as Methodism formally separated from the Church of England; and resensitised the historically painful area along the boundary between the Anglican Church and Roman Catholicism. The family at the Parsonage felt the impact of all these events, and each of the Bronte sisters attempted to steer her own course among them with characteristic fearlessness and determination. This absence of stasis in the religious lives of the sisters is another reason to avoid simple categorisation where their beliefs are concerned, in addition to the seeming contradictions and paradoxes referred to above. The terms in which Hoxie Neal Fairchild describes the Brontes' religion are over-simplified by any standards: Anne, never much tempted to smash through the wall which surrounded her, was a mildly faithful Evangelical. Charlotte, in whose mind Jane Austen and Mrs. Radcliffe contended for mastery, was a Broad Churchwoman. Emily, so pure a romantic that she reminded Matthew Arnold of Byron, cared nothing about Christianity, broad or narrow. Two of the most important religious influences on Patrick Bronte were Wesleyan Methodism and Evangelicalism in the Church of England, as he came to know and absorb it at Cambridge.

There is a general impression that the Welsh Nonconformist tradition is hostile to the introduction of religious instruction into education, hostile to denominational schools, and is the ally of secularist principles in education. This article can be no more than a note on the matter, but it may help to give Catholics working in Wales some clue to the understanding of the Nonconformist position.Most people are aware that the Welsh Nonconformist attitude was developed during the struggle between church and chapel in the 19th century. The ‘church’ was the established Church of England, the Anglican and anglicising church of the land-owning Tory Welsh-despising gentry. The ‘chapel’ was the loose confederation of three or four dissenting bodies to which the mass of the Welsh-speaking peasantry belonged. The Catholic Church hardly came into the picture.Indirectly, it was in it from the beginning of the struggle. It was in 1843 that the Calvinistic Methodist body confirmed its hitherto reluctant ‘dissent’ by a resolution to join the other Nonconformist bodies in the support of British schools, in which no dogmatic religion was taught, as opposed to the National schools of the Church of England. From that date the battle is engaged. The Calvinistic Methodist resolution was directly due to the progress of the Oxford Movement within the Church of England. The ‘Puseyites’ roused alarm in Wales. They seemed to herald the capture of the Church of England by Rome. Protestantism was in danger. The Catechism in the schools could be used to Romanise. The last link between the Church and the Methodists was broken, and the British school campaign was the answer of Welsh Nonconformity to the Oxford Movement.

Thomas Dongan was perplexed. In 1683, he had become governor of New York, the old Dutch colony that the British had conquered in 1664. Dongan was a Roman Catholic who keenly felt the desirability of religious tolerance. But he had never encountered such religious diversity as he had found in New York. When he arrived from England in 1683, he expected to find one or two ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, the Protestant state church of the Netherlands, and a Church of England minister preaching to the small but growing English population in New York. Instead, Dongan encountered a religious blend so rich and confusing that he hardly knew what to make of it. The Dutch Reformed Church was indeed the town’s largest congregation; Dongan observed that there were “not many of the Church of England, [and] few Roman Catholics.” But New York teemed with other groups. It harbored an “abundance of Quaker preachers and women [preachers] especially.”

Thisarticle provides a critical examination of the Church of England’s new Common Worship Ordinal from a Roman Catholic perspective. It uncovers the theology of Orders embedded in the rite, assesses the congruence between the rite and the theology embedded in it, and compares aspects of the rite to the Roman Catholic rite of ordination.

“A penny for the guy, please mister”. I never give small boys anything when they come out on the streets at the beginning of November every year, with the effigies of Guy Fawkes which they should be burning this evening. “Sorry”, I say, “but I am a Roman Catholic”. I like waiting for the look of pure astonishment that comes over their faces, as if that were a reason for not giving them a penny for the guy.When the Chaplain invited me to address you this evening he suggested that I might take the opportunity to reflect on the obstacles that Roman Catholics in England see as still blocking the way to union with the Church of England. So much rapprochement has taken place, particularly since the Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission which has since produced three remarkable “Agreed Statements” testifying to convergence, if not perhaps consensus, on traditionally controversial issues. These Agreements seem to warrant some movement towards full, visible, eucharistic communion between Rome and Canterbury. This growing together has been achieved in a variety of ways, at many different levels. The most significant movements have been in a phrase or gesture. On 25th October 1970, during his sermon at the canonization of forty Catholics of England and Wales who died for their faith during the penal days, Pope Paul referred to the Anglican Church as the “ever beloved Sister” of the Roman Catholic Church. Italian rhetoric, you may say; but I don’t think so. Such a change of idiom from previous references to the submission of a wayward daughter to her patiently waiting mother cannot be unconsidered. It marks a great change in Rome’s attitude to Canterbury.