The Churches
Crime and Canterbury
By MONICA FURLONG
DURING November Diocesan Conferences erupt like mumps, with, as many a bishop finds later to his cost, all sorts of unpleasant com- plications. Remarks on public morality, some- times of a terrifying indiscretion, which slip out easily in the boudoir atmosphere of the diocese, have a way of finding their way into the news- papers with every nuance of censoriousness and piety cruelly highlighted till the unfortunate speaker sounds as if he had been taking lessons from Savonarola. By the time Fleet Street gets hold of it, it is a wise Christian who recognises his own father-in-God.
To take an example, on November 19 tho Archbishop of Canterbury, with his foot on his domestic hearth, made a speech about the Betting and Gaming Bill which dealt mainly with the subject of sin and crime. (The Archbishop is against both.) He reiterated his belief, and it is one that stands reiterating, that crime ought not to be a preoccupation of the Church (except for ecclesiastical crime) and that sin ought not to be a preoccupatiOn of the State. Obversely, the Church should care very much about sin and the State should try to prevent crime, which the Archbishop defined as 'an act . . . injurious to public welfare.' Having thus prepared the ground, the Archbishop went on to suggest rather tenta- tively that the State might do worse than take a long, cool look at adultery, since in most cases it inflicted as much suffering on other people as other acts classified as crimes; that, in fact, tho State might one day come to decide that it was a crime. The suggestion was put no more strongly than this, as anyone who asks Lambeth Palace for a transcript can verify for himself. (From the kind of astonished gratitude with which my request for one was received by the Senior Chaplain, I inferred that few of the Archbishop's critics had been there before me.) I doubt if any of the Christians at the con- ference let the remark worry them very much, partly because Christians are supposed to regard themselves as 'strangers and sojourners' in this world anyhow and if one can't let off a few high- spirited firecrackers so far from home it is a .poor thing; partly because they know perfectly well that Dr. Fisher is a wise and loving man, given to occasional impulsive remarks which afterwards probably puzzle even himself; Partly because they had just discovered there is a thing called ecclesiastical crime which it is possible to be guilty of and weren't sure what it was. (As an Anglican, I have only just realised that I can be 'disciplined' for ecclesiastical crime and I don't care for the idea.) Outside the beloved community, however, the, fuss was ludicrous. At one end of the scale there was Lady Wootton observing sensibly that legally the idea would be a nightmare, and at the 'other were the Beaverbrook papers, all rhetoric and wounded virtue. The Evening Standard carried a sad little leader on November 20, complaining bitterly that the Archbishop seemed to think the British sinful people. In the sheltered cloisters Shoe Lane they took, it appeared, a different view. The last man to get into the act was. Canon Collins, who, with several trite generalisations about why 'everybody is fed up with the Church, confided in the Oxford University Labour Club that he feared his superior had gone mad. (If, as is sometimes asserted, the Church of England is run like a school, with Geoffrey Fisher as its headmaster, he could do worse than make Canon Collins write out 500 times, 'I must be loyal.') But what was the Archbishop really trying to say if, pace Canon Collins, sanity still reigns at Lambeth? A clue, some of his best friends have tried to tell us, is afforded by his references to the law regarding homosexuals in the same speech. The Archbishop made it clear, as he has done on previous occasions, that he is not in favour of treating homosexual acts between two consenting adults in private as a crime. The Arch- bishop disapproved partly on the same grounds as the Wolfenden Committee were against it: 'The secular law ought not to invade the privacy of the ordinary citizen save for gravest reasons'; and partly because he believes homosexuality (which, of course, the Church regards as a sin) could be dealt with more effectively pastorally if it was not also a crime. Either the State should stop treating homosexuals, who do not harm society, as criminals, and thus leave them at least as five of legal consequences as the adulterer; or else it must place adulterers, who are almost certain to do greater harm than homosexuals, on the same criminal footing. As the Archbishop's supporters think he meant, the law is unjust and illogical. Or as you and I are quite certain we mean, the law is a ass and a idiot.
This would have been a splendid thing for the Archbishop to say, but unfortunately he didn't say it. It seems more likely that Dr. Fisher intended to convey that adultery is at the moment the blind spot in the legislative eye; the ponce and the prostitute, the bookie and the pools pro- moter, the gambler and the homosexual have all recently had to endure the public and parlia- mentary gaze. The adulterer, who does as much social damage as most of these people, and much more than some of them, is rarely scrutinised except by the uncritical glance of the gossip columnist. It is possible that there is something unbalanced and immature in our refusal to see this act for what it is.
Within the Church, the Archbishop is likely to get some support from parish priests who repeatedly forced to see what adultery does to family life. One priest I talked to put himself in the adulterer's state of mind.
'If I wanted another man's wife, it seems to me that I could, fairly easily, induce in her the state in which she would be prepared to commit adultery with me. It would be a deliberate choice on my part—adultery isn't just something tbit happens to people. There would have been a moment when I could have set out to get her, or refrained from doing it. I should have done her husband and children more harm than if I had struck them, stolen their possessions or burned down their house, but the law still wouldn't call it a crime. This seems to me wrong.'
Personally, I couldn't help feeling a sneaking sympathy with the cabbie interviewed in the Evening Standard's Picture Probe. 'I don't mind the Church preaching, but they should not force their views on the public.' It is naïve enough, and a point of view no Christian would accept for a minute (I force more views in a year than there are tomatoes on Guernsey), but it is hard these days not to strike attitudes when the Church is mentioned. And adultery is a dreadful glass- house of a subject, since of those of us who haven't committed adultery, some have come perilously close, or can imagine circumstances where they might come perilously close, which is enough to make the stones fall from our nerveless hands. (On a strictly theological point, most Christians have committed adultery as de- • fined by St. Matthew v, 28—a saying of almost incredible hardness.) Strange as it may seem, about the only pers,m not to strike an attitude was a writer in the Daily Mirror who treated the speech with a sage civility that Canon Collins might do worse than copy : Every Christian rightly considers adultery a Sin.
The Archbishop of C rhury now S:IN
is inclined to agree thats011161tery should he mad,: a Criminal Offence.
No, Your Grace.
Adultery can certainly cause grave social harm. Like broken homes.
• But a law to prosecute adulterers could never he enforced.
To which I am delighted to say, 'Hear, hear." Or even 'Amen.'
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