THE CHURCH
A day in the life of God?
EDWARD NORMAN
It is a disagreeable thing when a man who has been in a position of confidence subse- quently chooses to compose an attack on his former employer, and it would have been suitable for the publication of Mr De-la- Noy's A Day in the Life of God* to have gone unnoticed. But the Bac has already taken it seriously in the slot once called `Lift Up Your Hearts', the Times has rushed into print some of the author's more sizzling remarks about the bishops and there will doubtless be further attempts from what may be described as the usual quarters to treat it as an authoritative picture of the inadequacies of the Church of England.
Although it is not a strenuous undertaking to represent the Church of England as a shambles, that is not exactly the purpose of Mr De-la-Noy's book. Most of the space is given over to a detailed chronology of the author's quarrel with the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose press officer he had been since 1967. Only a few pages here and there suggest even the beginnings of an argued case for reform : a new procedure for the election of bishops is proposed; the Establishment is also to be converted into a missionary society working to convert the Pagan nation which is England today, and so on. But these are mere spin-offs from the central proposition—that Mr De-la-Noy had been shabbily treated by the hierarchy. The bishops, indeed, are whipped into unrecognisable caricatures not because they are insufficiently liberal—a contrary thesis, even for the author's evident inventiveness, being unimaginable—but because they are exponents of an armchair liberalism. They do not dirty their hands with the real Purpose of the religious Establishment, which is, apparently, expressed in 'attacking racial prejudice, advocating pastoral aid for homosexuals, denouncing slums.' These gestures, however, tholigh implicit throughout the book, are not its main substance. They are posited as self-evident truths which all men of goodwill fall upon—in the words used by the author himself in describing the Primate's morning dive upon his mail—`as a schoolboy might
*A Day in the Life of God Michael De-la-Noy (The Citadel Press, Derby, £1.75)
descend on a pile of doughnuts'.
Beneath this layer of radicalism there is another. Mr De-la-Noy clearly finds the very existence of authority in the Church cruel and brutalising. He is out to break it up in order to establish a society in which con- fessional personal relationships supervene, where deep feeling and love will assume an immediate social expression—a notion, no doubt, agreeable to the great Founder of the Church of England (Henry vitt), but rather less than sensible for an institution which, whatever its spiritual commission, is obliged s to resort to all the bureaucracy of a real institutional structure operating in a real world. Touching such questions, however, Mr De-la-Noy's heart is probably in the right place, and it is to his credit that he did apparently seek to get his book withdrawn before publication.
Mr De-la-Noy's chief complaint is quite simply stated : he believes that the ap- pointment of Major-General Adam Block to the Church Information Office was a mistake. When De-la-Noy himself later came to work as press officer to the Archbishop he found that he became subordinated to the General. As a professional journalist he declares himself offended that an unqualified man, as he assures us that the General is, should assume such superiority in the ad- ministration of the Church. The General is dismissed in rather a large number of pages by the device of reproducing gossip about his supposedly reactionary opinions. He is displayed as a stock figure of the hated 'establishment'; a man who served 'South African sherry (to journalists of all people); who judged men by the length of their hair; and who objected to the author's expense ac- count after the Primate's visitation of the West Indies. The General, who has presumably commanded troops, is also represented as being so ignorant of the moral problems facing the present generation that it fell to De-la-Noy, as he claims, to explain to him, on one occasion when time itself must have stood still, what buggery was.
De-la-Noy's real difficulties began when he preached what is described as a 'dialogue sermon' at a church in Hove in which he suggested that a measure of relativism ought to be inserted into the Church's teachings on sexual morality. Some publicity resulted. Next he resorted to his professional expertise and undertook freelance articles in Forum and New Society. In these he described the familiar thesis of permissiveness and declared that the Church of England was falling badly behind in modern society's en- lightened pursuit of the sexual millennium. The Archbishop expressed doubts about the propriety of this sort of work for sexual liberation being done by his press officer, correctly supposing that the publicity at- taching to it would inevitably accumulate in loathsome abundance around the doors of Lambeth Palace. De-la-Noy, disturbed by what he considered a reactionary attempt at `censorship', thought of resigning. and only recovered himself on a train to Brighton when 'a young lad of nineteen bowled into the buffet' and described various ways in which he had been helped by the 'dialogue sermon' at Hove.
In July 1970, De-la-Noy was dismissed from his post by General Block. The two men met in London one Friday and agreed to discuss arrangements for announcing the news of the dismissal to the press on the following Monday. De-la-Noy afterwards repaired to a sauna bath where he told his story to a journalist friend who at once sold it to the Daily Sketch for £20. Gethsemane, however, was not without its compensations. De-la-Noy received a vast postbag of sym- pathetic letters, and, finally, one from the Archbishop of Canterbury himself whom De-la-Noy describes as 'egocentric', 'eccen- tric', 'insensitive' and 'intellectually arrogant'.
Such is the outline of events. The dismissal of De-la-Noy did indeed cause a shallow movement of opinion at the time, but it was a minor thing. The curious fact was not, as the book unconsciously reveals in every paragraph, that De-la-Noy was sacked, but that he was ever appointed in the first place. The book, with consistent clarity, tells us nothing of consequence about the people described in its pages except so far as they reflect the opinions and personality of the author. The affair in fact was not very im- portant—certainly it does not have the cataclysmic significance attached to it by De- la-Noy. 'When I was sacked by the Church of England I took part in a drama far larger than the sum of the individual people con- cerned,' he writes; 'I was involved in the death throes of a dinosaur.' His book is ex- plicitly intended to put the record straight for 'historians'. The 'establishment' con- trived his downfall 'because of their own deep insecurity'; he was the victim of a con- spiracy of amateurs out to discredit pro- fessionalism, and it was the professional who was sent empty away. Such is Mr De-la- Noy's analysis, and the only conclusion one can draw is that his dismissal, like that of Lord Hall from the Post Office, becomes self-evidently proper now that he has begun to enunciate his apologia.
If there are lessons to be learnt from this episode, they must surely be those which help to discredit the sensationalist tactics of contemporary radical polemicism. In this particular, the publication of Mr De-la- Noy's book—whose modish title, one sup- poses, refers to the author—has served some small purpose. Mr De-la-Noy himself is now working for the Albany Trust where, it is to be hoped, his real talents will at last be recognised. The Archbishop of Canterbury has emerged as a man of great courtesy, and proved sensitivity. The Church of England may even seem to have been sensible and tough. It is not often that so much can be achieved at one blow.
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