The Canterbury Trail

By Richard N. Ostling

Kremlin atheists quietly supervise the selection of Moscow's Russian Orthodox Patriarchs. Turkey's government leaders, though Muslims, are said to weigh in when Ecumenical Patriarchs are chosen. But imagine Italy's Prime Minister appointing a Pope, or President Bush picking the Presiding Bishop of his Episcopal Church. Just such a church-state mesh will occur in Britain in the coming months as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher prepares to choose the next Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England and spiritual leader of some 70 million Anglicans and Episcopalians worldwide.

The process began last week when Robert Runcie announced that he will step down next January, eight months shy of mandatory retirement at age 70. Like all English bishops, his successor will be named by the Prime Minister and formally appointed by the Queen. Thatcher, raised as a Methodist, is probably not sorry to see Runcie go: she has been vexed by his pleas for the suffering poor under her economic policies and doubtless agrees with Peterborough's Bishop William Westwood that "the church needs to take a less high profile" under its next leader.

Following a procedure revised in 1977, candidates for the post will be selected by a panel of bishops, priests and lay people chosen by the church, with a Thatcher appointee in charge. The panel will propose two names to the Prime Minister in order of preference. She gains further leverage through her power to reject both names and demand new ones, although such a move would be extraordinary.

Runcie, named in 1980, is universally admired as a man. But as a church leader he is faulted by both liberals and traditionalists for chronic indecision. Runcie's defenders say his cautious style helped work a miracle or two in preventing world Anglicanism from flying apart over women priests and bishops. Yet the compromises he engineered merely paper over the fact that the Anglican Communion is barely a Communion any longer. Some of its 27 autonomous national branches -- including the U.S. Episcopal Church -- ordain women priests, who are not recognized by Runcie's mother church and other branches. Nonrecognition of priests (male and female) ordained by women bishops will further muddy the waters.

Meanwhile, the Church of England is fast fading as any kind of force in the nation's life. The church's regular worshipers constitute a paltry 2.4% of the population. Only 29% of England's babies are baptized as Anglicans. The decline had set in long before Runcie's reign, but he proved powerless to stop it. With England becoming a mission field, the future may lie with the Evangelical wing, which runs some thriving parishes and is gaining the majority among priests.

Though speculation abounds over the wide field of potential successors, no clear front runners have yet emerged. The grim truth about the job may be, in the words of Archdeacon George Austin of York, that "no one wants it. It's too awful. I have often seen Robert Runcie gray with exhaustion." The Runcie decade was one of the most contentious ever, and his successor will confront the same passionate left-right disputes -- not only over women clergy but homosexuality, remarriage after divorce, modernization of The Book of Common Prayer, and assaults upon belief in Christ's virgin birth and bodily resurrection. Whoever gets the nod, said an editorial in London's Daily Telegraph, the prospect of change at Canterbury is bound to inaugurate the Church of England's "most serious debate on the future" since King Henry VIII broke from Rome in 1534.

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London