"I have, alas, only one illusion left," admitted 19th century English Clergyman Sydney Smith, "and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury."
Americans who view the Primate of All England as the final personification of the formidable, ceremonious English Establishment are unlikely to be disillusioned by the sight of the 100th Archbishop, who this week begins a 23-day tour of the U.S. A huge, shambling man, with fierce tufts of white hair and shaggy eyebrows jutting from his massive head, Arthur Michael Ramsey, 57, looks constantly at the ready to don cope and miter for the crowning of a Queen or the intonation of a weighty pronouncement. "When you see him in the Abbey, enrobed and preaching on Christmas, he and the church are one," says one of his vicars. "He is the church."
But Michael Ramsey is also a complex churchman who is facing complex 20th century problems. A Cambridge-trained scholar and theologian, he came to Canterbury with a reputation for both deep spirituality and donnish wit—a man unwilling to compromise his own stern theology, but so fond of epigrams that he gives them up for Lent. Frankly at home in high-church ceremony, he nonetheless seems at times the amiable country parson, enjoying simple amusement in self-deflation. Archbishop Ramsey always signs his name "Michael Cantuar"—the traditional Latin abbreviation for Canterbury —but he sometimes autographs pictures "Michael, Archbishop of Canterbury," joking that the longer title "seems to give the people more for their money."
Battling Indifference. Michael Cantuar heads a church that some think is almost illusory despite its established position. Although 27 million Englishmen are baptized as Anglicans, fewer than 10 million are confirmed members, and only 3,000,000 are regular communicants. The church is short on priests and short on reform, and after 15 months at Lambeth Palace, Ramsey does not underestimate the seriousness of the plight.
"The major problem facing us," he says, "is of religion itself, of promoting religion in a country and a world where people are indifferent to it." For the specific problems, Ramsey has prescribed some solid measures. Through widespread recruitment and expansion of training facilities, the margin of new clergymen over deaths and retirements is slowly beginning to widen; and last week the church got its first fulltime recruiter of clergymen.
Ramsey is more and more concerned about public issues, as though heeding such critics as Author J. B. Priestley, who wrote recently that the Church of England "spends too much time dressing itself up and not enough time dressing other people down." The Archbishop fights capital punishment, advocates general (though not unilateral) disarmament, spoke out vehemently in the House of Lords against the bill to slow nonwhite immigration from other Commonwealth countries. Last week the church proposed the establishment of a National Council of Alcoholism—predicated on the recognition that alcoholism is a disease rather than a moral flaw. In the continuing English debate on laws concerning prostitution, homosexuality and adultery, Ramsey holds that "morality is not best promoted by giving criminal status to every kind of grievous sin."