A Peerage for a Presbyterian

January brought good cheer and good news to the Very Rev. Sir George MacLeod, fourth Baronet MacLeod of Fuinary, sometime Moderator of the Church of Scotland and--quite possibly-- that nation's best-known living Protestant minister. In her New Year's Honors List, Queen Elizabeth raised Sir George to the rank of baron; he thus becomes the first Church of Scotland cleric ever entitled to sit in the House of Lords.

Although MacLeod will be the only Presbyterian minister in an assembly that contains 26 Anglican bishops, he does not intend to be a spokesman for his faith, since, as he puts it, "I have not been famous for always saying the same thing as the Church of Scotland." Indeed not--and if anything characterizes Sir George's career, it is contrariness. As a captain of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders during World War I, he won the Military Cross and Croix de Guerre for gallantry--but later became one of Britain's most vociferous pacifists.

Crypto-Communist. An aristocrat by birth and education (Oxford), he is also one of Scotland's leading socialists. Although MacLeod was chosen as Moderator of his church in 1957--the sixth member of his clan to hold the office--many of his fellow Presbyterians grumble that he is either a crypto-Communist or a Roman Catholic in disguise.

Such charges stem from MacLeod's role in creating one of the century's most influential experiments in Christian living, the lona Community. In 1938, he gave up his parish ministry in a Glasgow slum and with a group of sympathetic clerics and unemployed workers went to the tiny island of lona, off the west coast of Scotland. It was a meaningful and symbolic choice: from lona during the sixth century, the Irish missionary St. Columba set forth to Christianize the wild and pagan Scots. There MacLeod sought to build a cooperative community of dedicated Christians who would unite work, study and prayer--a modern Protestant counterpart of the ancient monastic ideal.

Duty of Involvement. The lona Community now numbers 125 ministers, 25 lay members, and 600 lay associates who contribute to its support. During the summers, many of them have gathered on lona to pray and study together --and to work on the restoration of the island's medieval abbey, which fell into ruin after the Reformation. The rest of the year, members of the community work in Britain's industrial slum parishes, preaching lona's ideals: the Christian duty of political and social involvement, and the necessity of sacramental worship. Thoroughly ecumenical, the lona Community includes Anglicans, Congregationalists, Baptists and Methodists as well as Presbyterians, and many of MacLeod's ideas have been adopted by such ecclesiastical experimenters as the Anglican worker-priests of England and the Protestant brotherhood of Taize in France (TIME, Sept. 5, 1960).

Now 71, MacLeod lives in an Edinburgh flat, identified not by his name plate but by a passport-size portrait. He travels much of the year, preaching the lona ideal in a glass-shattering baritone that still needs no microphone to reach the farthest corner of the loftiest church. He bristles when addressed as "Sir," on the ground that ministers should not use hereditary titles--although he has no objection if his wife is called Lady MacLeod, since "she's not a minister." Elevation to the peerage has not changed his views. "I hope," he says, "that people will continue to call me Dr. George."

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