One Big Family

"Heaven save us from a jamboree," cried the Most Rev. Donald Coggan, Archbishop of York. But he need not have feared; the Second Anglican Congress in Toronto opened last week with more than its share of bite and fight. Billed as a family gathering of the 18 autonomous churches that make up the Anglican Communion, the Toronto Congress amply demonstrated that the family today is one, big, and far from happy with its place in the world.

At the first working session Canon Max Warren, general secretary of Eng land's Church Missionary Society, rose to contend that "God was at work" in a pair of non-Anglican thinkers who are customarily linked among religion's enemies: Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Warren argued that the modern Chris tian concern for social justice "owes not a little, under God, to the stimulus of Marx," and that Christians who really understand the value of psychoanalysis "will humbly thank God for his grace at work in Freud."

Civil rights raised more furor. At an executive meeting of the House of Bishops the night before the Congress opened, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. endorsed the Washington civil rights march next week, and passed a resolution urging both laymen and ministers to join it. But there were some quiet dissents from Southern Episcopalians. "The resolution was not the way to accomplish anything," complained Bishop George Gunn of Southern Virginia. "Mass meetings don't help anybody." And at an open session of the Congress, Layman Francis T. West of Martinsville, Va., complained that by using Christianity as a front in the civil rights issue, the church "thus becomes a mere handmaiden of the pseudoliberals." West's speech earned a mixture of scattered applause and hisses.

The loosely knit Anglican family is drawing closer together and beginning to see the need for more action in common. In his unity-centered keynote address, the Most Rev. Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury and primate of the Communion, called for a new sharing of missionary responsibilities. "Let African and Asian missionaries come to England to help to convert the post-Christian heathenism in our country and to convert our English Church to a closer following of Christ," he said. The archbishop may get his wish some day. At a meeting of an advisory council of Anglican prelates, the churches worked out a plan that included a better distribution of missionary work among the branches of the Communion.

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