Crime & Sin

As might be expected, the Archbishop of Canterbury is against sin, but he is against it in a special way. Last week Dr. Geoffrey Francis Fisher added his voice to the growing body of British opinion in favor of the Wolfenden Report (TIME, Sept. 16), which recommended that 1) homosexuality between consenting adults no longer be considered a crime, and 2) that since little could be done about the prostitutes that swarm over London, perhaps their fines should be increased to -L-10 ($28) for a first offense. Dr. Fisher's reason for giving the report his qualified endorsement: he approves of the document's implicit distinction between sin (the concern of religion) and crime (the concern of the law).

Wrote Dr. Fisher in the monthly Canterbury Diocesan Notes: "Sin is an offence against God. Its measurements do not vary from age to age as man's laws do ... So then, whatever from time to time the criminal law may say, homosexual offences are sins; the life of a prostitute is a life of sin; the men, many of them regarded by themselves and others as reasonably respectable citizens and certainly not criminals, who add their own sin to the sin of the prostitute are sinners ... A crime is a different matter, a sin against society and social order of such a kind that the law has to take note of it."

The archbishop seemed to separate man-made law from moral or natural law in a way that some theologians would disagree with. Wrote Fisher: "Why is there a realm 'which is not the law's business?' Just because man's ultimate responsibility is to God alone, and in that responsibility no man can deliver his own brother, there is a sacred realm of privacy ... a realm of his own essential rights and liberties (including, in the Providence of God, liberty 'to go to the devil')." Into this liberty, wrote Dr. Fisher, the law must not intrude: "Only God's love has an inherent right to entry there."

Agreeing, in principle, with the Wolfenden Report's strictly limited premise that the law must confine itself to preserving public order and decency, Fisher nevertheless cautiously conceded that if "without undue interference" the law can do anything "to strengthen the moral stamina of the people, it ought to do it ... It is not easy to say whether the community as a whole does not need protection from the private immoralities, whether of homosexuals or of heterosexuals." But, in sum, he doubted that a clear way could be found "by which, without fatal damage to the general principle of the report, adultery, fornication and homosexual offences could be effectively restrained by legal penalties."

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