The Span of the Cross , livre ebook

THE SPAN OF THE CROSS
THE SPAN OF THE CROSS
Christian Religion and Society in Wales 1914–2000
D. DENSIL MORGAN
© D. Densil Morgan, 1999
First Edition 1999 Second Edition 2011
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2397-7 e-ISBN 978-1-78683-078-4
www.uwp.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.
  The right of D. Densil Morgan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
  Cover image: Caroline Loveys, The Crucified Christ , 1995–6, stained glass window at the Church of St Peter, Little Newcastle. Photograph by Martin Crampin.
 
Y mae rhychwant y groes yn llawer mwy
Na’u Piwritaniaeth a’u Sosialaeth hwy …
(‘The span of the cross is greater by far Than their Puritanism or their Socialism …’)
D. Gwenallt Jones
 
Dedicated to
  R. G. ROBERTS JOHN RICE ROWLANDS OLAF DAVIES
  Ministers of the Word
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface to the Second Edition (2011)
Introduction: a faith for the third millennium
1 The state of religion in 1914
2 Christianity and the First World War, 1914–1918
3 Anglicanism and Catholicism, 1920–1945
4 Nonconformity 1920–1945: confessing the faith
5 Nonconformity 1920–1945: responding to the secular challenge
6 Reconstruction and crisis, 1945–1962
7 Uncharted waters, 1962–1979
8 Towards the new Wales, 1979–2000
Notes
List of illustrations
1. Lloyd George and Revd Thomas Charles Williams
2. Soldier in Corpus Christi procession, Cardiff, c .1915
3. Archbishop A. G. Edwards and the bishops of the Church in Wales, 1931
4. Francis Mostyn, Roman Catholic archbishop of Cardiff, in Grangetown, 1928
5. Revd E. O. Davies, Llandudno; Revd R. B. Jones, Porth
6. Revd Tom Nefyn Williams with a group of Caernarfonshire fishermen
7. Bryngolwg church soup kitchen, Miskin, Mountain Ash, during the depression
8. The campaign for Sunday opening of cinemas, Merthyr Tydfil, 1956
9. Archbishop Edwin Morris and the bishops of the Church in Wales, 1958
10. Corpus Christi procession, Cardiff, 1960
11. The disaster at Aberfan, 1966
12. Revd Kenneth Hayes
13. ‘Remember Jesus’ campaign, Gwynedd, 1972
14. Presentation ceremony of the New Testament, the New Welsh Bible, 1975
15. Opening service of the National Assembly, Llandaff Cathedral, June 1999
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for their help in preparing this book: my brother-in-law, Mr Huw Harries, for enlightening me on the contribution made by the Welsh regiments during the First World War and on different aspects of military history generally; the Revd Roger L. Brown who read the typescript chapters on the Church in Wales and so aided my untrained Nonconformist eye to appreciate many details pertaining to the more recent history of Welsh Anglicanism which otherwise would have escaped me; the Revd Dr Elfed ap Nefydd Roberts who performed a similar service in the sections on the Presbyterian Church of Wales and gave me the benefit of his insights into a number of ecumenical concerns as well; my colleague Dr Tony Brown of the School of English and Linguistics, University of Wales, Bangor, for sharing with me his expert knowledge of Welsh creative writing in English and for discussing some of the religious themes contained therein; Dr Ian Randall of the International Baptist Theological College in Prague for answering my enquiries about aspects of the spirituality of twentieth-century evangelicalism, and Br William Nicol of the Community of the Resurrection for his hospitality in allowing me to peruse material on Bishop Timothy Rees in the Mirfield archive. Professor A. M. Allchin read the book in its entirety and made valuable suggestions which I have tried to incorporate in the final text.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to those students who chose to pursue postgraduate research on Welsh religious history under my supervision, namely Miss Helen Mai Owen, who shed a flood of light on the way in which secularization affected the Calvinistic Methodists during the early decades of the century, Dr Robert Pope, who has made such a signal contribution to our knowledge of the inter-relation between Nonconformity and the Labour movement, and Dr Trystan Hughes, who has unearthed so much fascinating detail relating to the history of Catholicism in twentieth-century Wales. Although he was not a student of mine, I learned an enormous amount about ecumenism from the doctoral thesis (and viva voce ) of another Bangor researcher, the Revd Dr Noel A. Davies, whose dissertation was, alas, the last to be supervised by my erstwhile colleague and mentor, Professor R. Tudur Jones. The friendship and fellowship engendered by our collaboration (and which, happily, has now been provided with an institutional base in the Centre of Advanced Study of Religion in Wales) is something which I will treasure always. I would also like to record my thanks to Professor Gareth Lloyd Jones and colleagues in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at Bangor for their support, and to my fellow Church historian, Dr Geraint Tudur, for valuable assistance in matters photographic as well as academic!
Ms Susan Jenkins, Ms Ceinwen Jones and Ms Liz Powell at the University of Wales Press have been exceptionally helpful and efficient during the production of this study, while my wife, Ann, has displayed her usual interest and concern during the years since I have been engaged in the present venture. My thanks to her, and to our children, is, as always, immense.
It is a particular pleasure to dedicate the book to three preachers of the gospel whose ministry has meant much to me and to many others for a very long time. In honouring them, I register my appreciation for all those who (like R. S. Thomas’s ‘Country Clergy’) have been called to proclaim the Word during this momentous century:
… They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes; rather they wrote
On men’s hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.
D. Densil Morgan Bangor, November 1999
The extracts from the poetry of R. S. Thomas are reproduced by permission of J. M. Dent, and the extracts from the work of D. Gwenallt Jones and from ‘Mewn Dau Gae’ by Waldo Williams are reproduced by permission of Gomer Press.
Preface to the Second Edition (2011)
Perhaps the most graphic image of the new millennium was the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on the morning of 11 September 2001. The fact that this was seen throughout the world virtually as it happened illustrated not only the potent effectiveness of globalized technology but underscored the fact that religion, in this case as a malign force, would be a prevailing reality in the twenty-first century. It may be that the trends described in the final chapter of The Span of the Cross have continued unabated throughout the last decade, but religion has thrust its way from the periphery to the centre of the public imagination. Within its new context of an increased pluralism, an affirmed multi-culturalism and a much more strident atheist antagonism, Christian discourse has remained a factor within post-devolution Wales.
Institutionally, Christianity has followed the trajectory traced in the chapters that follow. The two reports Churchgoing in the UK: A Research Report from Tearfund on Church Attendance in the UK (2007) and Blunt and Bowyer’s Presbyterian Church in Wales: Key Research Findings (2009) charting more recent developments, along with the researches of the University of Glamorgan based sociologist Paul Chambers ( Religion, Secularization and Social Change in Wales (2005) and ‘Out of taste, out of time: the future of Nonconformist religion in Wales in the twenty first century’, Contemporary Wales (2008), 86–100), have shown that statistical decline has continued apace and that traditional forms of religiosity, denominationally structured and theologically liberal, have suffered the most. As this is hardly unexpected, little needs to be said of it here. There are other changes within the three older traditions: Roman Catholic, Church in Wales and Nonconformist, which do invite comment, though it is beyond the mainstream denominations that the most significant developments within Welsh Christianity seem to have occurred.
The Roman Catholic Church in Wales had been spared the agony of the paedophile priest scandal which had begun to inflict itself on some English dioceses during the early 1990s and would later undermine the authority of Catholicism in Ireland, but at the turn of the millennium it registered in Wales in a spectacular way. In 1998 Fr John Lloyd, a Cardiff priest and press secretary to Archbishop John Aloysius Ward, was imprisoned for serious sexual offences against a series of young people who had been in his charge. The archbishop, who was a close confidant of Lloyd’s and had known of allegations made against him, had done nothing to investigate them. Ward compounded his culpability by ordaining, also in 1998, Joseph Jordan, a known paedophile who had transferred from the jurisdiction of the diocese of Plymouth having fallen foul of the church’s own child protection guidelines. Jordan’s proclivities soon became known within the archdiocese of Cardiff – he was i