Archbishop Fisher, 1945–1961

Church, State and World

Andrew Chandler, David Hein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317179795
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Archbishop Fisher's archiepiscopate reflected the central issues of his time and place. It was Fisher who oversaw an immense programme of reforms which effectively recast the institutions of the Church of England for generations to come. It was Fisher who proved to be the essential architect, politician and diplomat behind the creation of a worldwide Anglican Communion. His determination to promote the development of relations with other churches produced a vital contribution to the cause of ecumenism, which culminated in his momentous meeting with Pope John XXIII. Archbishop Fisher was a vigorous participant in the questions which defined national and international life. This book explores Fisher's influence on major contemporary issues and events, including divorce-law reform and capital punishment at home and the end of Empire and the most dangerous years of the Cold War abroad. This new biography establishes the continuing significance not only of the office of Archbishop in the Church but also of the Church at large in the tumultuous world of the later twentieth century. A final section of original source material includes letters, sermons and other writings bringing vividly to life the range and character of Fisher's public and private role.

PART I
Life

Introduction:
Out of the Ruins ...

The 98th Primate of All England, William Temple, died in 1944, and the following year Winston Churchill named Geoffrey Fisher as his successor in the Chair of St Augustine of Canterbury. The prime minister’s choice proved controversial, however, because another man, Bishop George Bell of Chichester, looked to many the wiser appointment. What was indisputable was the severity of the challenges that the new archbishop would face. The Second World War would soon be over, and then the mammoth project of rebuilding would commence in earnest. For both the church and the nation, this effort of reconstruction would be spiritual as well as material.

The facts of the situation were bald enough. The country was heavily in debt and dependent on a large, though not indulgent, American loan. Many cities had been bombed, some of them severely. More than a million houses in London had been damaged or destroyed outright. At least one city, Coventry, had seen its cathedral razed to the ground. Much of the population was displaced. The infrastructure was hard-driven, if not worn out. The churches, too, were battered but hopeful. The Church of England was ostensibly led by bishops who by and large had little clear idea of what they were supposed to be doing, though some of them did whatever they decided upon well. Some were industrious, others were simply enigmatic.

Few if any historians could evoke the postwar mood or depict the moral and physical ruins of civilization as effectively as the English novelist Rose Macaulay in her 1950 novel, The World My Wilderness, set in the years just following the Second World War.¹ In this book the author expresses in a clear and moving way her fears about the future of British society. This novel, she said, ‘is about the ruins of the City [the business center of London], and the general wreckage of the world that they seem to stand for. And about a rather lost and strayed and derelict girl who made them her spiritual home’.² Although only 17 (and the daughter of a King’s Counsel), this central figure, Barbary, is already barbarous: wild, intractable, given to acts of defiance and petty theft. ‘“Civilised ...” Barbary seemed to examine civilisation, balancing it gravely, perhaps wistfully, against something else, and to reject it, as if it were mentioned too late’ (33). The child of a broken home, during the war she had lived in the South of France with her beautiful, intelligent, idle, pleasure-loving mother, whose notion of parental love did not entail a heavy investment in adult supervision.

As a member of a band of boys and girls assisting the Maquis during the Occupation, Barbary was brutally and far too rapidly transformed from a child of innocence into a child of experience. After the war, living in London, she remains somewhat of an anarchist, preferring to live amid ‘the ruined waste lands ... the broken walls and foundations ... the roofless, gaping churches, the stone flights of stairs climbing high into emptiness’ (61). These places, she feels, are where she belongs: at ‘the waste margins of civilisation ..., where other outcasts lurked, and questions were not asked’ (110).

In this novel, Rose Macaulay was shining the light of her torch on the spiritual wreckage of postwar Britain – on the desolate areas of both cities and souls which leaders such as Geoffrey Fisher would have to search out and tend to. In a violent and treacherous world, one that bears a growing resemblance to a moral wasteland, Macaulay was asking: how many Barbarys might we be producing? How many children may be growing up too fast, lacking adequate care and security, and hence rootless, sullen, suspicious and defiant? This novel is full of compassion toward all of its characters, but especially toward Barbary, who, as one literary scholar wrote in summarizing the author’s attitude toward her creation, ‘is thoroughly lost, thoroughly pathetic, and very much worth saving’.³

Toward the end of The World My Wilderness, Macaulay appears to raise a final question: Does the church have a role to play in this work of rebuilding? While Barbary’s only religious belief is ‘in hell’ (174), her half-brother Richie – who fought in the war, endured three years in a German prisoner of war camp, escaped, and now desires only the beauty and refinement of ‘aristocratic culture’ (150) – is drawn to the church. But the lure appears to be largely aesthetic and nostalgic: ‘In this pursuit he was impelled sometimes beyond his reasoning self, to grasp at the rich ... panoplies, the swinging censors, of churches from whose creeds and uses he was alien, because at least they embodied some continuance, some tradition’ (150). In the last pages of the novel, however, Richie literally takes steps toward the church, possibly reflecting a deeper quest for order and meaning in his life and in the lives of others. Fully conscious of the barbarian threat (‘the primeval chaos and old night’), he murmurs to himself T.S. Eliot’s words from The Wasteland: ‘We are in rats’ alleys, where the dead men lost their bones’ (253). Then, ‘[s]huddering a little, he took the track across the wilderness and towards St. Paul’s [Cathedral]. Behind him, the questionable chaos of broken courts and inns lay sprawled under the October mist, and the shells of churches gaped like lost myths, and the jungle pressed in on them, seeking to cover them up’ (253–4).

What the church received with the appointment of Geoffrey Fisher to the see of Canterbury was, at the very least, a man of strength, discipline and tenacity – indeed, a former headmaster – who would not readily submit either to primeval or to ecclesiastical chaos. Everything that he did was connected to the service of one overriding goal: building up the church, and thereby enlarging the clearing in the wilderness. Overshadowed both by his famous predecessor, the philosopher and ecumenist William Temple, and by his widely loved successor, the theologian and spiritual guide Michael Ramsey, Geoffrey Francis Fisher (1887–1972), 99th archbishop of Canterbury, has tended to be ignored by professional historians. But in fact his was a pivotal archiepiscopate, one that cries out for fresh examination. Not least was it the case that so many of the problems and initiatives of his tenure anticipated the major events in Anglican church history and theology in the decades that followed.

Fisher’s period in office began and ended with the bridge-building work of ecumenism. Preaching at Cambridge in 1946, he urged the Church of England and the Free Churches to work toward establishing ‘full communion’: sharing the sacraments with one another but stopping short of complete union. And in 1960, at the end of his tenure in office, Fisher embarked on a tour that included stops in Jerusalem, Istanbul, and Rome. His meeting with Pope John XXIII marked the first time that an archbishop of Canterbury had visited the Holy See since Archbishop Thomas Arundel undertook the journey in 1397. Fisher was also the key person in building up the modern Anglican Communion. In the 1950s his trips to West Africa, Central Africa and East Africa were major parts of his successful effort to establish new provinces within the Communion. Indeed, his work anticipated the transformation of the British Empire from a far-flung imperial domain into a commonwealth of sovereign states. His frequent visits to Canada and the United States, coupled with his efforts to include the American bishops and others in the deliberations of the Lambeth Conference, helped to make the Anglican Communion an experienced reality for many Anglicans and Episcopalians outside Britain.

Of particular interest, too, is the relationship between the Church of England and the nation. The senior prelate whom millions of people around the world watched as he conducted the coronation ceremony for Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953, Fisher has been referred to as the last archbishop of Canterbury to oversee the workings of a great Establishment church. After him, British society and the churches were forced to change, responding to increased immigration, religious pluralism and secularization. It was solidly in the context of the Establishment, too, that Fisher intervened in political affairs: in the Suez Crisis of 1956, in debates on the use of atomic weapons, and in his strong sense of the pervasive responsibility of the Established Church within national society. All of this offers an important opportunity to discern the positive as well as the negative aspects of that Establishment. This commitment influenced not only his responses (sometimes supportive, often critical) to government initiatives but also his understanding of the place of the Church of England in relation to the other churches.

Fisher’s time in London, first as bishop of London (1939–45) and then as archbishop of Canterbury, was a period of war, devastation and rebuilding in the capital city and the nation. How well did Fisher prepare the Church of England for what followed? What were the strengths and weaknesses of his approach to the task of fortifying the church – and the Anglican Communion – for the future? What were his personal strengths and weaknesses as a leader for this crucial time in the history of Christian institutions? What kind of an ecclesiastical statesman was he? This time of both reconstruction and fresh initiatives was a bridge period for the church. One aspect of his work that should attract our attention is not only what an archbishop of Canterbury can do during such a time but also what he chooses not to do. It is fundamentally important to see what an administrator of Fisher’s ability was actually able to accomplish, both in his own distinctive right and in working hard to bring about conditions within which diverse men and women could flourish. Fisher’s tenure represents a distinctive approach to the office. His was not...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword and Acknowledgements
• Part I: Life
• Part II: Documents
• Bibliography
• Index