Frances Knight

Cremation and Christianity: English Anglican and Roman Catholic attitudes to cremation since 1885

Abstract Britain was the first modern European country to adopt the widespread practice of cremation, and by 2010, it took place in around three-quarters of all funerals. Although the clergy had ceased to be the exclusive custodians of funeral ritual, their views and example remained highly significant in conveying approval, or disapproval, of cremation to their religious constituencies. This article explores attitudes to cremation amongst the English Anglican and Roman Catholic leadership in the twentieth century. In the first half of the century, a number of high-profile Anglican bishops promoted cremation by both teaching and example. The Roman Catholic Church, however, remained opposed to the practice, which it equated with atheism and inhumanity. Although the Catholic position began to soften from the 1960s, it is evident that some reticence about cremation remains. The different approaches to cremation illuminate a subtle religious and cultural fault line between the two ecclesial communities which has hitherto been little explored. The article highlights the role of the Cremation Society of Great Britain in working with members of both Churches to normalise cremation.

The Pastoral Ministry in the Anglican Church in England and Wales, C. 1840-1950

The hundred years from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century was a period of profound and lasting change in many of the theological, liturgical, financial and administrative aspects of Church life in England and Wales, but the basic assumptions about the nature of the pastoral ministry changed relatively little. The min isterial ideal of 1950 — that a clergyman be godly, prayerful, sta ble, moral, caring and reasonably well educated, was not fundamentally different from what it had been in 1840, nor, as has been shown by contributors writing on other periods in this volume, from many earlier times. Throughout the period c. 1840-1950 there reigned supreme the ideal of the beneficed clergyman as professionally auto nomous, a self-employed, independent gendeman. Although in England at least, less so in Wales, he belonged by education and birth to the middle or higher echelons of society, by about 1840 he was devel oping an increasing sense of separation between himself and the secular world. One outward symbol of this was the adoption of dis tinctive clerical dress. This had started with the black coat and white

The Bishops and the Jews, 1828-1858

Between 1830 and 1858 fourteen separate attempts were made to remove the legal disabilities which prevented Jews from sitting in Parliament. The first bill was dismissed by the unreformed House of Commons, and the next twelve, from 1833 onwards, were rejected by the Lords after being passed by the Commons. It was only the fourteenth attempt, a carefully constructed compromise between leading members of both Houses, which finally was to prove acceptable. The struggle for parliamentary representation became the longest and most bitter battle which the Anglo-Jewish community had to wage with the Christian Establishment during the nineteenth century. After the election of Lionel Nathan Rothschild as Member of Parliament for the City of London in 1847, the campaign became one of constitutional urgency, and not merely of hypothetical significance. Rothschild was re-elected with an increased majority in 1849, and returned again in 1852 and twice in 1857. In 1851 he was joined in the shadows of Westminster by David Salomons, when Salomons won a seat at Greenwich. The electorate, even in places such as Greenwich, which lacked a significant Jewish population, had apparently delivered its own verdict on the suitability of Jews being admitted to the legislature.

Ministering to the Ministers: The Discipline of Recalcitrant Clergy in the Diocese of Lincoln 1830–1845

By 1830, the effectiveness of the Church of England’s ministry was believed to have become seriously compromised, because it still possessed no adequate means for disciplining its clergy. It had long been recognized that the Church’s structure, and in particular the strength of the parson’s freehold, made it impossible for it to exercise the same sort of authority over its ministers as the dissenting bodies, or even the Church of Scotland. The view that the inadequacy of disciplinary measures was detrimental to the standing of the Established Church was in fact shared both by those hostile to and those supportive of it. On the one hand, John Wade’s Extraordinary Black Book , published in 1831 and intended as an indictment of corruption, rapacity, and jobbery within the Establishment, made the exposure of abuses in Church discipline one of its principal objectives. Not unnaturally, loyal churchmen also expressed considerable anxiety at the spectacle of bishops almost powerless in the face of clerical malefactors within their dioceses. Throughout the 1830s, the correspondence of clergy and the speeches of senior Anglicans in Parliament reflect an urgent desire that appropriate measures be swiftly introduced in order to combat cases of clerical irregularity.