Battle over Benefices

"This is the most important document ever to come before a Church Assembly," said the Rt. Rev. Kenneth Riches, Anglican Bishop of Lincoln. The document is a dry, statistic-laden paperback called The Deployment and Payment of the Clergy. But behind that grey title it is an incisive, reform-demanding anatomy of Christian Britain and the Church of England.

Written by Anglican Layman Leslie Paul at the request of the church's Central Advisory Council for the Ministry, the report is an attack on the quaint English parish system that dates back to Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury in the 7th century. Today the Church of England has 15,488 priests for its 14,491 parishes, but no equitable way to distribute them. Only about 6,000 of the church's clerical livings are directly assigned by bishops and diocesan authorities. Nearly 2,600 are benefices controlled by Anglican laymen as private patrons. Others are filled by Oxford, Cambridge and the Crown, which have the right to appoint rectors on behalf of benefactors who are aliens, lunatics or Roman Catholics. A few parish advow-sons (the right of filling a benefice) can even be bought on the open market, like used castles.

Feudal Chaos. The feudal chaos of special privileges is compounded by the fact that once most priests are installed in their parishes, they possess them for life as "parson's freeholds," and they cannot be budged except for heresy, grave crime or the promise of richer livings. As a result, about one-fifth of England's clergy gloom about in ghost parishes with a handful of communicants and faintly Trollopean titles. Another fifth can barely keep up with the man-killing spiritual work of fast-growing suburban parishes.

Paul proposed that the church transform its lifetime parish freeholds into leaseholds with a maximum tenure of 15 years. Bishops, who themselves would be limited to 15-year terms, would have the right of appointment to all livings in the dioceses, in consultation with regional staff boards and a new centralized personnel office for the clergy. Paul proposed that bishops should amalgamate many small city parishes, and that benefice income should be pooled to create a common fund, thereby allowing bishops to establish a uniform salary scale for the clergy--and to reward the more talented priests with appropriate raises.

"Revolution at the Vicarage." Paul's recommendations will be debated at the Church Assembly next month. Meantime, his ideas touched off what London's Sunday Times called "a battle royal" among the clergy. In the Anglo-Catholic Church Times, the Venerable Guy Mayfield, Archdeacon of Hastings, summed up the report as "sometimes unhappy and amateurish and sometimes superfluous." Roman Catholics and Methodist ministers spoke up in envy of the freedom of speech that went with the "virtual irremovability" of the Anglican vicar. But nearly everyone agreed that something had to be done about the outdated freehold system, and, in the Laborite Daily Herald, the Rev. Nick Stacey of Woolwich, crying "Reform or die," called for a "revolution at the vicarage."

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