PRIESTLY CHANGES

There seem to have been a number of changes in the religious world in the last week or so. It's interesting to look at the different ways in which they came about.

Over in England, the Bishop of Durham, Justin Welby, has just been appointed as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury, an unbroken line that goes back to St. Augustine at the beginning of the 7th century. The Archbishop is formal CEO of the Anglican Church, that curious hybrid of an essentially catholic ritual and doctrine housed in an organisational structure that broke from Rome in the 1530's because the Pope would not sanction an annulment of Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Since then, the church has been the established church of England, with the monarch as its head, and Bishop Welby's appointment reflects that political reality. A committee in the inner reaches of Whitehall draws up a list of candidates, the Prime Minister makes a choice (officially a recommendation to the monarch), and the Queen approves said choice.

Bishop Welby is an unusual appointment. He didn't come to the priesthood until his mid-30's, having worked in the oil industry for more than a decade. He has also been a bishop for less than a year, which is not very long; and in moving into the top job, he has vaulted above other candidates, notably the church's number two, the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu. The Archbishop of Canterbury's less formal role is as leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, a sort of federation of like-minded autonomous churches. This is under great strain at the moment, since there is deep conflict between liberal-minded episcopalians in the U.S. who tolerate female bishops and gay priests, and conservative Africans who believe that homosexuality is a mortal sin. Born in Uganda, Dr. Sentamu might have been thought to be the man best able to bridge that gap. However, Bishop Welby's experience with finance might have tipped the scales. The Church of England is a huge property owner, and sorting out its ramshackle finances must be a priority.

Here in Denmark, a new Bishop of Fünen was consecrated last weekend. Denmark also had an ecclesiastical revolution in the 1530's, when the then monarch changed over to the Lutheran faith in 1536. The 1849 constitution introduced and guaranteed freedom of religion, but Lutheranism has remained the state religion; the monarch is the head of the church, priests are state employees, and the whole thing is financed by a church tax (though you can opt out of that if you disagree).

The most striking difference about Lutheranism is that there is no equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Each of the 11 dioceses (10 in Denmark itself and one for Greenland) is pretty well autonomous, though convention has it that the Bishop of Copenhagen is somewhat primus inter pares, officiating at royal marriages and such like. One reason is that the historical equivalent of Canterbury during the Middle Ages was Lund, in what is now southern Sweden. This was part of Denmark for 600 years and only became Swedish in the middle of the seventeenth century after Denmark ceded it as the price for losing one of the interminable Swedish wars.

The second difference is that bishops in Denmark are elected. The electorate consists of the priests and members of the local parish councils within the diocese, in the case of Fünen roughly a couple of thousand people. You don't have to be a practising priest in order to stand, though you do have to have the qualifications required in order to be a priest (basically, a master of theology). If nobody gets 50% of the vote, then there is a run-off between the top two candidates. There were four candidates, and the winner this time was a woman, another difference from the U.K. Female priests have been allowed in Denmark since 1948, and the first female bishop was consecrated in 1995. Today more than two thirds of theology students are women, and the clergy is expected to be a female majority profession within the near future. Middle Age clerics would turn in their graves.

Finally, we got a new local parish priest today. The last one had been in the job for 31 years, so it was time for a change. He is being replaced by the grandson of the man who did the job before him. Married to a priest, son of two priests and grandson of another, you could say that he comes from an ecclesiastical family. He was invested by the rural dean; though, being a state appointment sanctioned by the Church Ministry, it did sound somewhat more bureaucratic than (say) Bishop Welby's investiture will be next spring.

My wife has just been elected to the local parish council, one of whose jobs is to appoint the local priest. As part of the welcoming ceremony, the outgoing and incoming councils, plus their partners, were invited to dinner this evening in order to make him feel at home. I sat next to the organist, a charming woman in her 60's who turned out to be an American who had lived in Denmark for 50 years. Over coffee in the drawing room, I then had a long chat on the politics of the Danish church with the dean, a rather florid man who reminded me a lot of a mediæval prelate. There may be many ways of carrying out religion, but a political element seems to be common to all of them.

Walter Blotscher