York to Canterbury

The furthest-left primate the staid old church of England has ever had was this week promoted to the top of the ecclesiastical tree.

On April 1, the Most Reverend and Rt. Honorable Dr. William Temple, now Lord Archbishop of York, will become Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, in succession to Dr. Cosmo Gordon Lang (TIME, Feb. 2). His place at York will be filled by another left-of-center prelate, Dr. Cyril Garbett, now Bishop of Winchester.

Characteristically, on the Sunday evening his promotion was announced, the new Primate preached in a bombed-out church in a working-class district in Hull. The bundled-up congregation shivered in blasts that came straight off the North Sea through the glassless windows. It was also characteristic of Dr. Temple-who, besides being a ranking church statesman, is one of the world's most learned theologians-that he should have published last week a popular book on Christianity and the Church in Britain's best-selling Penguin series. Sample quotations:

P: "Our snobbery as a nation is without parallel."

P: "Politics is largely a contention between different groups of self-interest."

P: "Every citizen should have a voice in the conduct of the business in which he works; [he] should have sufficient daily leisure and two days' rest in seven."

P:"Since money is primarily an intermediary it should not be possible to 'make a living' cut of its manipulation."

In a time of crisis such as England has not known since 1066, Dr. Temple is the right man to head the Church. He was one of the very few British leaders bold enough and clear-sighted enough to denounce the surrender at Munich promptly and openly. He condemned Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy as "sheer opportunism," proposed calling "a Congress of Europe" to discuss orderly treatment of the problems of World War I treaty revision. In 1939 he advocated postwar Federal Union.

York is as well-liked by Nonconformists as by members of the established Church of England. He is slated to be president of the new British Council of Churches (equivalent to America's Federal Council) and has frankly said: "If it ever appears that Establishment is the bar to the union of the church in this land, I shall start an agitation for Disestablishment." Known to churchmen everywhere are the far-to-the-left Malvern Conference he summoned last year and the interdenominational program for "Social Justice & Economic Reconstruction" (TIME, Jan. 5) which he prefaced last December.

Dr. Temple was born to the ecclesiastical purple-his father was Archbishop of Canterbury before him. After a brilliant career at Oxford, topped by a first in classics and the presidency of the Oxford Union (traditional steppingstone for British statesmen but a post also held by Dr. Lang, Temple's predecessor at Canterbury, and Dr. Garbett, his successor at York), he was in quick succession an Oxford don (philosophy) at 23, a headmaster (of Repton) at 28, rector of London's fashionable St. James's Church, Piccadilly and chaplain to the King, a bishop at 39, an archbishop at 47.

Now 60, he is a plump, jovial, teetotaling nonsmoker. Like other British prelates, Dr. Temple lives in a palace, but he and his family use only one wing, dine in a tiny room which was formerly their cook's sitting room, serve themselves from a buffet hotplate. The rest of gorgeous 701-year-old "Bishopthorpe" has been turned over to evacuees. Though an archbishop, Dr. Temple still acts as a parish priest to his community. When his servants marry, he gives them wedding receptions at the palace; when the city of York held a blood-donors week, the Archbishop and an early-bird plumber were the first two donors to turn up.

Dr. Temple's successor at York, rubicund, 67-year-old Dr. Cyril Garbett, has some pet antipathies: dictators, divorce, slums, sex novels, road hogs. Before Winchester, Dr. Garbett was Bishop of South-wark, the slum-ridden southern section of London which the Salvation Army's General William Booth once called the greatest area of unbroken poverty in Europe. There he, like York, developed a strong sympathy for the underdog.

In the largely rural diocese of Winchester, Dr. Garbett has kept close to his people by making his episcopal visitations afoot. Clad in a purple cassock and with a 500-year-old shepherd's crook as his walking stick, he made an annual tour of the diocese, stopping at every parish church to hold services. As early as 1933 he warned Britain to arm against the Nazi threat.

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