The 100th Canterbury

Of 53 million people in Britain, more than 27 million have been baptized in the Church of England, but fewer than 10 million have been confirmed, and fewer than 3,000,000 are registered on parish rolls. If these facts might seem to argue that the church should win back its flock, the newest Archbishop of Canterbury, on his enthronement last week, made no sign that he will attempt to spoon-feed religion or pretend that Christianity is another kind of tranquilizer. Arthur Michael Ramsey, a man with a single-minded devotion to God,* made clear that it is up to the people to come back to the church.

Divines from the East. The enthronement of the 100th Archbishop was a splendid ceremony. Never in history had the Anglican Communion rallied such a massing of the cloth as turned out at the 800-year-old Canterbury Cathedral to honor the new Primate of All England. More than 1,000 prelates walked in a mile-long procession to the clamor of bells, their many-colored robes billowing in the summer breeze. There were Anglican bishops, Scottish and Free churchmen, European Lutherans, and Old Catholic bishops from The Netherlands in the stiff white ruffs of a Van Dyck painting. Among the bearded divines from the East were the Orthodox Archbishop of Thyateira in a brocade cape of gold and scarlet, the Metropolitan of Carthage, and the Most Rev. Nikodim, Archbishop of Yaroslavl and Rostov, representing the Patriarch of Moscow. Anglican bishops came from New York, Gibraltar, Amritsar in the Punjab, Borneo, Jordan, the Sudan and Quincy, Ill. A congregation of 4,000 was waiting for them.

They came to honor a tall and ponderous man whose heavy handsomeness and white-fringed head made him look much older than 56. From Canterbury's "Red" Dean, 87-year-old Hewlett Johnson, Dr. Ramsey received the gold-encrusted shepherd's crook of his office, then moved to the grey marble Chair of St. Augustine,/- on which each Archbishop of Canterbury has sat for his enthronement since 1205. Before speaking, Ramsey seemed deliberately to dismiss the pageant splendor around him, fumbling in his robes for his spectacles and his handkerchief. Carefully he cleaned each lens, placed the glasses on his nose, and wiped a drop of moisture from the palm of one hand. Then he began in fluting tones to preach for the first time to a flock that is noted in all Christendom for its indifference to the church.

"The Will to Go Apart." Archbishop Ramsey, a scholar and theologian rather than an extravert administrator like his retired predecessor, Dr. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, promised that the Church of England would "strive to penetrate the world of industry, of science, of art and literature, of sight and sound." But he seemed to speak with more feeling of the importance of scholarship and the need "for constant detachment, a will to go apart and wait upon God in quiet and silence."

Only once did he sound any kind of tocsin. Under the same roof where another Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket, was martyred in 1170 to preserve his church's integrity, Ramsey served notice on the state that he would "ask for a greater freedom in the ordering and in the urgent revising of our forms of worship." In 1928 the House of Commons rejected the established church's request for permission to make changes in its liturgy in order to enforce more liturgical discipline upon clerics whose services ranged from quasi-Roman to semi-Congregational, according to taste. The new Archbishop implied that if the request were turned down again, it might lead to disestablishment. "If the link of the church and state were broken," he said, "it would not be we who ask for freedom who broke it, but those--if there be such --who denied that freedom to us."

* On the windshield of his car is a poem that begins Grant me, O Lord, a steady hand and watchful eye

That no one shall be hurt as I pass by.

/- Not the 5th century Bishop of Hippo and founder of the Augustinian philosophy, but the 6th century missionary, sent to England by Pope Gregory, who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

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