It might be said that Pope Leo XIV has tough acts to follow in Pope Francis, in Pope Leo XIII, the architect of Catholic Social Thinking/Teaching, and indeed in all the Popes going back to St Peter. Or we could say that he has some inspirational predecessors.
There have been beautiful messages and prayers from the Church of England, other denominations, other faiths and other world leaders, but also from people all over the globe, including the peripheries. Lay Catholics are touched by our friends of other religious backgrounds and those without any religious beliefs who have commented with such grace on the example of Pope Francis and now on the election of Pope Leo XIV.
There has also been generous coverage in the secular media of Rome for the death and funeral of Pope Francis, for the Conclave and for Pope Leo, with commentators often pointing out that the late Pope Francis had declared 2025 to be a Jubilee Year with the theme of ‘Pilgrims of Hope’. Even more than usual, a side-benefit of this has been the ease of finding pilgrims from all over the world ready to share with broadcasters their love of the Popes. The media have also seen significance in Pope Francis dying at Easter and in Pope Leo from the Americas being chosen in Europe on VE Day.
In the abstract, people who are against the papacy tend to focus on infallibility. In the real life persons of actual Popes, however, people often warm to the attitudes of Popes to fallibility, to their own shortcomings and to the compassion they show for the rest of us who are also in need of mercy and grace.
Pope Francis taught us not only in his real life but in the reality of the manner of his dying. Now, in death, he has been praised for his appointment less than two years ago of Pope Leo as a Cardinal and as the head of the dicastery which recommends to the Pope the appointments of bishops all around the world.
The new Pope’s initial words have been about peace and bridges, as befits the Pontifex, which is Latin for bridge-builder. He has been described repeatedly as a reconciler and messages from other denominations have called for him to exercise a ministry of reconciliation.
The William Temple Foundation is one of many institutions to discern in the choice of name of Leo an indication of the new Pope’s commitment to social Justice. Leo XIII’s famous Encyclical, Rerum Novarum, from the 1890s, sets out Catholic Social Teaching. Leo XIII was influenced in this by Cardinal Manning, who was born in the first decade of the nineteenth century and who died in its last decade. Some seventy years before William Temple, William Beveridge and R H Tawney were students together at Balliol College, Oxford, Manning studied there. He was a married Anglican priest whose wife died. He became a Catholic in the 1850s, then a Catholic priest, Archbishop of Westminster and eventually a Cardinal. He is credited with resolving the dockers’ strike and his funeral brought people out onto the streets of London out of respect for his community engagement. The social justice agendas of Temple, Beveridge, Tawney, Leo XIII and Manning were closely aligned and transformative in the hundred years between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. There is much to ponder, as the pontificate of Leo XIV takes us towards the middle of the twenty-first century, in the wisdom and practical achievements of this quintet of Anglicans, Catholics and, in Beveridge, a respectful non-believer.
Before concluding with some thoughts on reconciliation, I pause to answer readers of my last blog, on the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday, who have been asking me about Sr Philomena Doherty, a former chaplain of Liverpool Hope University, whom I mentioned had died on Good Friday. Sr Phil’s funeral took place today in Southport. The Requiem Mass was celebrated beautifully in the Birkdale Convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame by her fellow chaplain and great friend, Fr Peter Hannah. When my middle brother (Mgr Canon) Martin died a couple of years ago, our sister Mary found in his room a letter from Fr Peter Hannah. They had never met but Fr Peter had been praying for Martin for over twenty years, since learning that Martin was suffering from Parkinson’s. There were wonderful vignettes at today’s funeral of Sr Philomena as someone who had a way of listening and affirming. The phrase ‘She was only 88’ makes sense, given that one of the mourners, a former governor of Liverpool Hope, Sr Susan Mary Waters is 101 yet does not seem to have aged in the last thirty years. Pope Leo XIV is ‘only’ 69. Sr Phil and Fr Peter were a wonderful duo within the ecumenical chaplaincy team at Hope because of this gift of placing others first.
This brings me to Albino Luciani, the Patriarch of Venice, who was made a cardinal in 1973 by Pope Paul VI, and went on to succeed him as Pope John Paul I in 1978, only to die a month later. When made a Cardinal, he was in the middle of his teaching ministry through writing a series of imaginary letters to famous figures from history and literature. These were initially written for a Catholic journal but were later collated and published as a book under the title Illustrissimi.
In September 1973, for example, he wrote a letter to Casella, a musician and friend of Dante. Dante imagined encountering Casella some time after his death, still outside Purgatory and asking why Casella has not been admitted yet. Casella says the angel-boatman had not chosen him until Pope Boniface declared a Year of Jubilee in the year 1300, at which point the angel would take all-comers. Meanwhile, on Earth, pilgrims were converging on Rome to celebrate this Jubilee. Boniface had thought a Jubilee should come every one hundred years but his successors as Popes soon changed this to every fifty and then every twenty-five years, so that as many pilgrims as possible could have the experience at least once in their lifetime. Luciani, later Pope John Paul I, writing in 1973 notes that Pope Paul VI had declared that the next Jubilee in 1975 would have as its theme ‘Reconciliation’.
The message of this letter and of that Jubilee was that the world needs peace through reconciliation but the first step is to reconcile yourself from within. Luciani tells a story of a Korean general who dies, is judged and assigned to Paradise but asks St Peter if he can take a look at Hell first. It has a long table with plentiful bowls of aromatic rice between diners facing each other but the chopsticks were so long that nobody could feed themselves a single grain of rice. They all looked miserable. This was Hell. When the general got to Heaven, the scene was an identical long table with food and long chopsticks but here everyone was happy. Heaven was feeding each other: ‘each, having picked up the food with the chopsticks, raised it to the mouth of the companion opposite, and all managed splendidly. Thinking of others, instead of oneself, resolved the problem, transforming Hell into Heaven.’
Sr Phil would have been 89 on 13th May, which happens to be the Feast of St Julie Billiart, the foundress of the Sisters of Notre Dame. Sr Phil was a Sister of Notre Dame for 64 years. That is a long time to be thinking of others but that is what it can take to be reconciled to oneself so as to be able to bring about reconciliation in and between others.
The 80th anniversaries of VE Day and later this year of VJ Day also have elements within them of being exercises in reconciliation.
This sense of learning to be at ease with yourself in order to serve others as a reconciler had one other extraordinary lesson this week. We might expect Popes, Sisters, and veterans to understand the symbolism and the practice of such reconciliation but rugby players might not be your next choice of people speaking about God. Yet on being announced also on 8th May as the captain of the 2025 British & Irish Lions for their tour of Australia this summer, Maro Itoje told the BBC about the captains’ dinner with his predecessors in these terms: ‘To be at a dinner with some of the true icons of the game and be able to break bread, talk and listen to their stories and their experiences was special.’ Maro Itoje has spent even less time as a club and country captain than Leo XIV spent as a Cardinal.
Maro Itoje, whose first cap for the Lions was eight years ago when he was 22, was then asked if he would like to have been captain on an earlier Lions expedition, as this will be his third tour. His impeccable reply was, ‘I think God’s timing is always the best time. I’ve never felt more competent and more ready for the role as I do now’. By which he meant that he was now less focused on himself and could attend more to reconciling different characters within the team.
In calling Sr Phil and Pope Francis home and in the call from the Cardinals of ‘Habemus Papam’ (‘We have a Pope’) in Leo XIV, whose pontificate is expected to be one of reconciliation, God’s timing is infallible.
When asked about Pope Francis over these past twelve years, I have enjoyed replying that Francis is my middle name, both in the sense that my name is Simon Francis Lee and in the sense that I hold Pope Francis in high esteem.
It has been touching how many of different denominations and faiths have been offering condolences to Catholics this week. Pope Francis has struck a chord with the wider world.
When I was an undergraduate, we had three Popes in a single year, 1978: Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II. I thought this was extraordinary but those who were not Catholic seemed unmoved. Incidentally, remembering the smiling Pope, John Paul I, raises the possibility that Pope Francis might come to be known as Francis I. It is more fun to guess which name the next Pope will take than it is for those of us who are uninformed to speculate on who will be that Pope.
If not Pope Francis II, perhaps Benedict and Francis will turn out to be the start of a sequence and we might get our first Pope Dominic, to include another founder of a religious order. St Francis and St Dominic are said to have met in Rome in 1216. Pope Francis met a Dominic in 2013, a boy with cerebral palsy, whose parents have wonderfully told the story behind that encounter.
When I was a postgraduate student in the USA, Pope John Paul II’s visit to America led to the immortal line from a Protestant farmer, ‘You sure got a Pope who knows how to pope’.
When John Paul II died in 2005, I was the head of a secular university and said, in response to requests from colleagues, that all staff could, if they so wished, take time out to watch the funeral on screens across our campuses. This occasion of solidarity had a number of unforeseen graces.
When Pope Benedict XVI visited the UK in 2010, he blessed a new John Paul II Foundation for Sport, of which I was the inaugural chair. I was struck by how prominent atheists Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins tried to protest against Benedict’s visit but soon gave up when the crowds showed a love and respect for the Pope. What I remember most from that papal visit, however, is that my priestly brother Martin got to meet the Pope at St Peter’s Residence in Vauxhall, where he was part-time chaplain and ultimately a resident. Martin had claimed in advance not to be that excited about meeting Pope Benedict but the live stream footage suggested that when he did actually meet him, he clung on for some time and was much moved by the experience.
Pope Francis has given us many memorable moments, meeting the most disadvantaged, washing the feet of prisoners, and setting an ecumenical example in meeting Christians of other denominations, rabbis, imams and people of other faiths and of no religious belief. His exhortations began with Evangelii Gaudium in 2013 and his concern for those on the peripheries has been inspirational, but perhaps his best known communication is his Encyclical Laudato si’ from 2015. It is not always clear to everyone what Laudato si’ means and what the Encyclical is about, so it might help to know that the Letter is described in English as ‘On care for our common home’, and addresses environmentalism and sustainability. It begins,
“LAUDATO SI’, mi’ Signore” – “Praise be to you, my Lord”. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs”.
Pope Francis’s legacy includes not only this body of work and his vigorous cheerfulness when in better health, but also the witness of him enduring his latest bouts of ill health with faith, hope and charity. His determination to carry on with his duties, on Easter Sunday, is an echo of the late Queen Elizabeth II’s remarkable resilience, her faith and her sense of duty.
Our parish, the Church of Our Lady, Help of Christians, and St Lawrence, Olney, in the Diocese of Northampton, started a Laudato Si’ group, which has spawned other activities. We had Mass this morning for Pope Francis. It is possible to watch the funeral in our parish hall after early Mass tomorrow, twenty years after that Papal funeral for John Paul II. Our parish’s First Thursday Discussion Club after the evening Mass next week, on 1st May, will be contemplating Popes and Parables with special reference to Pope Francis. All are welcome, on the first Thursday of every month.
In the middle of these papal vignettes, there was a time when the death of a church leader did shake me. It was not that the death was unexpected. Archbishop Derek Worlock had chaired the panel, alongside Bishop David Sheppard and Sisters of Notre Dame, in December 1994 appointing me to be the head of the ecumenical merger of colleges which is now Liverpool Hope University, but by the time I took up the post in September 1995, he was in his last illness. He died in February 1996. In The Serendipity of Hope, (published in the USA in 2023 but now available as an ebook) which I co-edited with the Very Revd Professor Ian Markham of Virginia Theological Seminary, I have written about this. When we heard the news of his death, I suddenly felt the burden of responsibility for keeping Hope alive (as Archbishop Derek Worlock was such a fearsome champion of our ecumenical witness that while he was alive we had seemed invulnerable). Two of our chaplains, Sr Phil Doherty and Fr Peter Hannah, understood that intuitively so just came to be with me in my office as an upholding presence, which gave me a glimpse, beyond our daily morning prayer together, of how the chaplaincy team and wider student services would be astute to discern when students and colleague needed support.
I imagine something similar happened to the whole community when Archbishop William Temple died in 1944. Again, it was not exactly that it was unexpected, as he had suffered from gout all his life (yes, you can have gout in childhood and no, gout is not caused only by alcohol – Temple was a teetotaller). But the timing of his last illness, when he had done so much to lift spirits during the War and had done so much to prepare for peace and justice after the War, meant that many people had to rally round the vacant see, so to speak. This Foundation is testament to the fact that more than eighty years later, we keep alive the genius of Archbishop William Temple, and we uphold in our prayers all those disconcerted by the vacant sees of Canterbury and of Rome. People will still be inspired by Pope Francis in the next century and beyond.
Everyone knows that Pope Francis died on Easter Monday. You now know that Sr Philomena Doherty, a Sister of Notre Dame, died just before him, on Good Friday. May Pope Francis and Sr Phil rest in peace.
Professor Simon Lee is the Chair of the Trustees of theWilliam Temple Foundation.
The William Temple Foundation is grateful to Andrew Graystone for his 2021 podcast and his 2022 Temple Tract on the tragic and large-scale abuse by John Smyth.
It was through these sources that many of us became more fully aware of the scale of his abuse and its impact on the lives of Smyth’s victims, although some had known since the 2017 investigation by Channel 4 News. Cathy Newman’s return to the story this year has led, alongside the Makin Review, and the courage of survivors and of the Bishop of Newcastle, to the Most Rev Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury. We continue to hold the victims of John Smyth in our prayers and we pray too for Archbishop Justin and his family as they adjust to this unhappy ending of his tenure. The authorities will need to look after his well-being while they renew efforts to help victims of abuse and to prevent abuse as much as possible.
There are lessons for all of us. For example, could our Foundation have done more to disseminate and amplify the work of Andrew Graystone?
How can we encourage the religious or secular media to recognise the insights in such work? A model of how a trustee can make a difference came with Dr Helen Reid, then the director of the Leeds Institute, hosting an event at which Andrew Graystone and two respondents, Catherine Beaumont and Susan Shooter, authors of relevant works in their own right, all spoke powerfully.
Should we and/or others have done more to question more persistently Justin Welby’s judgement? In 2013, his first year as Archbishop of Canterbury, while not acting effectively on the Smyth case, Justin Welby rushed into a hasty condemnation of the late Bishop George Bell (who worked so closely with Archbishop William Temple), based on an accusation of abuse which had no substance. Then he said there was still a cloud hanging over Bishop Bell. Only reluctantly did Welby eventually apologise and accept that he was wrong at each prior stage of that saga. It is instructive to read Archbishop Justin’s statement when he finally admitted he was wrong – The timeline is explained well here,
It sits uneasily with his inaction in the Smyth case. Who in the Church spelled out to Justin Welby that this was no way to behave? Was he given extra training? Again, what do we do if we see such errors of judgement?
In 2022, Justin Welby spoke out against the ecclesiastical court process in between a hearing and the judge’s decision, in the case brought by Jesus College, Cambridge about the memorial in the chapel to Tobias Rustat, their major benefactor from the seventeenth century who, it emerged, later had shares in a company which was engaged in slave-trading. Welby was exasperated with the whole idea of a hearing, of due process and the rule of law. He did not wait for the reasoning of the judge and it was quite improper to behave in that way. Again, who in the Church told him that? Letter-writers to the Church Times did. The College lost but were opportunities lost to follow up with the Archbishop the letter-writers’ warning about respecting the integrity of the legal process?
How much should critics push when senior people in an institution are manifestly inconsistent, behaving erratically, or not up to their responsibilities? It is notoriously difficult to get managers, colleagues and those with governance responsibilities to accept that their judgement is flawed, endangering other individuals and the institutions they are meant to be leading. Whistleblowing is important as are critical secular and religious media, and institutional change to independence in safeguarding.
Yet when Archbishop Justin Welby came in his 2019 William Temple lecture to praise Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche, just before Vanier was unmasked as a serial abuser, we might forgive his naivety and consider, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ (see the Full Lecture Transcript here). Some of us believed that Jimmy Savile was simply an eccentric when it is now clear that he was a serial abuser, hiding in plain sight. Conversely, some too easily accepted the fantasies of Carl Beech, the liar who falsely accused senior Conservatives of abuse, and was eventually sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Rather than judging Justin Welby, the lessons for us from the events of recent days and of several decades are about honing our own judgement. As we have been arguing all year, and in previous years, even when we might despair of institutional, community or society’s failures, there is always radical hope for change. To return to Andrew Graystone’s Temple Tract, we were grateful in 2022 not only to the author but also to the Archbishop of York for his long and challenging preface. We are open now to both these writers, of the Tract itself and of the preface, if they wish to reflect on what they highlighted then and what they think are the lessons now. We are also open to offers of insights by others. Thank you.
Simon Lee, Chair of the Board of Trustees, William Temple Foundation
Whether you are for or against law reform to facilitate assisted dying, and whether or not you prefer to call it assisted suicide, we can all benefit from some assistance in arguing about ethics and law in matters of life and death. Indeed, this is the role of the William Temple Foundation, to promote faith in the public square. By public square, we mean all spaces, physical and virtual, where people can exchange ideas and show solidarity or respectful dissent.
The paradigm, for many, is when this culminates in a debate worthy of the name in Parliament, especially if the result is not a foregone conclusion on political party lines, but where there is what is deemed to be a vote of conscience. Whether this is what happens next month when Kim Leadbeater’s Bill receives its Second Reading in Westminster (and there is a similar debate in prospect in the Scottish Parliament) is not just up to the MP. All of us can make a difference, not least through listening attentively in the intervening weeks.
The Bill introduced this week is known in the media as the Assisted Dying Bill but its formal title is the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill. The last debate in the House of Commons on Assisted Dying, on Friday 11th September 2015, was enlightening and uplifting, with some MPs saying they had changed their minds since coming into the chamber because of the quality of other contributions. The speeches are still well worth reading. The Commons was at its best.
Expertise and experience ranged from senior lawyers to senior doctors via daughters and nurses. One newly elected MP, Sir Keir Starmer, took the opportunity to set out his experience as the Director of Public Prosecutions. He wrote the guidelines on when to prosecute, consulted widely, and had to consider 80 cases of assisted dying/suicide, deciding not to prosecute in 79.
Another newcomer on the Labour benches was Yasmin Qureshi, one of a trio who were in the 2015 General Election the first Muslim women to become MPs. She had been up at 5am that morning, having tea with her mother who had been told earlier that year she had three days to live. Her mother, in her eighties, had been distressed and worried that she was a burden to her family, but she had recovered and lived until 2020. Nadine Dorries, much criticised later for her devotion to Boris Johnson, also gave a moving speech in the Commons, relating her experiences as a nurse and friend of the terminally ill. Dr Philippa Whitford, then the Scottish National Party MP for Central Ayrshire, drew on her thirty years as a cancer surgeon to report that,
“Some 96% of palliative care specialists are utterly against this Bill. They object to the name of it; they consider what they do is assisted dying, and what this is is assisted suicide.” She insisted that, “We need to change our tone towards the people who live in our society, so that old and vulnerable people no longer feel that they should get out of the way.”
One MP after another disclosed how constituents had written and told their stories. There was a real sense of engagement and a clear vote against the Bill by 330 votes to 118.
Kim Leadbeater MP believes the mood of a much-changed Commons is now very different. If she secures a majority in the Commons, then the Bill will go to the Lords where there will be familiar voices in favour, Lord Falconer and Lord Carey, with some very powerful voices against, including Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, the Paralympian, Baroness Finlay the long-serving palliative care consultant, and Lord Williams.
When he was Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams had previously presented arguments to Parliamentary Committees with the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. They had also written to the media and to MPs with the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. The Church of England and the Catholic Church had worked together on joint statements since the Hillsborough Disaster. The more faith leaders included this time round, the better. But this is not an issue of religious against secular. There is a group, for example, called Humanists Against Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia that also gave an impressive submission to a Parliamentary Committee. Joint submissions benefit from assisted arguing in their composition.
The stories which we will hear in the coming weeks are uneasy cases. They are hard but if you are not left with a sense of unease, whichever position you adopt, then you have probably not given enough attention to the counter-arguments. In that spirit, it is good that Kim Leadbeater MP has invited the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, a noted critic of her proposal, to a meeting, and has done so in gracious terms.
Less graciously, since writing Law & Morals in 1986, I have identified (for instance in Uneasy Ethics in 2003) what I regard as the main bad arguments which feature in such debates: to accuse the other side of playing God, to try to win the debate by terminology, name-calling, the slippery slope, the danger of activities going underground or into the back streets if you prohibit them, and the accusation of inconsistency. Nobody seems to agree with me on these, at least not when they are deploying such techniques.
I conclude with one simple point about our rhetoric on assisted dying. As with Henry Scott Holland being misunderstood on death, another one of Temple’s predecessors as a Balliol student is being quoted out of context. The mid-nineteenth century poet Arthur Hugh Clough captured imaginations with his couplet, ‘Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive, Officiously to keep alive’. But this comes from a poem which is sarcastic. Clough takes each commandment in turn and attempts to show how we only pay lip service to God’s will. A sermon by an Anglican layperson in the early years of the twentieth century puts this couplet in context. George W E Russell preached in St Stephen’s, Walbrook, in words that might apply also today to pollution of lakes, rivers and seas:
‘The maintenance of human life, the cultivation of public health as leading up to that, is one of the prime duties … yet I fear that during the greater part of English history, almost down to within the last twenty years, the creed of most public bodies with reference to sanitary administration has practically been that of the sarcastic couplet from Clough’s poem,
“Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive Officiously to keep alive.”
‘Well, our duty as Christian voters is exactly the opposite of that … sanitary legislation …care for a pure water-supply, the improvement of insanitary and overcrowded dwellings, are practical ways’ to make a difference.
Those who coin phrases, as with Temple for the ‘Welfare-State’, cannot control their use, misuse and abuse. But Russell’s explanation of Clough’s expression puts the latter firmly in the context of the social justice concerns which Temple, Beveridge and Tawney addressed all their lives, and which continue to animate this Foundation.
It is not enough to be against, or for, assisted dying. Our duty to those who are marginalised is one of assisted living, to live their lives to the full, contributing to the well-being or welfare of society, with proper investment in this case in hospices and supporting the terminally ill and their carers in their own homes, whatever happens to this Bill. One small step for those of us on the margins of debate in the public square is to offer assisted arguing, and then to commit ourselves to assisted listening.
Simon Lee is Chair of the board of trustees of the William Temple Foundation
Various commentators and rioters discovered Southport this summer, following the tragic killing of three young girls who were stabbed to death at a dance studio. The seventeen year-old attacker also inflicted serious injuries on other little girls and on adults who tried to protect them. He was soon arrested back in the place where he lived, Banks, just north of Southport. He has appeared briefly in court in Liverpool. His mindset is, for now, unfathomable.
We might learn more at his next court hearing later this year. Those who took to the streets and attacked people and property are being dealt with swiftly by the legal system. Judge after judge has emphasised that there was no excuse for the violence which followed in various towns. In particular, there were nasty attacks by a mob on a mosque in Southport. It was uplifting, in contrast, to see Southport residents clearing up the mess left by the rioters and helping to restore the mosque and the confidence of its community. This is the real spirit of Southport.
While keeping the victims and their families in our thoughts and prayers, is there something else that we can do when tragedy strikes? In particular, is there something that we can learn from what has been missed by mass media and social media coverage?
When my wife, Patricia, was a little girl, she moved with her family to Southport in 1967. We were married in Southport in 1982. We visited frequently until my parents-in-law died in 2006. We have continued to go there. Those who have never left, of course, know Southport better. And some of those who came to it for the first time this summer seem to think they know all they need to know about it. But having moved to the west, east and south of Southport, while frequently visiting over decades, gives a certain perspective that might be of interest.
Commentary hitherto has almost completely omitted the history and geography of Southport and Banks, the flows of people and of the sea. Yet accretion and erosion up and down the Sefton Coast has had practical and economic consequences for Southport’s tourism and can be seen as a symbol for fluctuating fortunes and receding opportunities. Or, more positively, it can be seen as an early warning of the environmental crisis and an encouragement to foster sustainability. Certainly, a glorious history repays careful study. At the very least, those interested in theology in the public square, the domain of the William Temple Foundation, might wish to know a little of the background to the places and communities thrust so wretchedly this summer into national consciousness.
I have drawn attention before to the pioneering Christian witness of a principal of our William Temple College, Mollie Batten. She was the only woman to participate in the Lambeth Conference of 1968. Mollie Batten went to school in Southport during the First World War.
I have also advocated tracking the path of William Temple across the North of England, way before he became Archbishop of Canterbury. Parts of a speech he gave when he was the Bishop of Manchester in 1926 are well-known to Temple scholars for what he said about the Labour movement. This is worth re-reading at the end of a summer where Labour formed the government and took the seat of Southport, which has had Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs in recent decades. But perhaps the occasion and the location have been forgotten. It was when the Church of England held their Church Congress in Southport. You can see the bishops processing along Southport’s magnificent Lord Street in a clip from Pathe News. Temple observed, as if anticipating this summer’s rioters, that, ‘Mobs are capable of a degree of deliberate and callous cruelty of which their individual members would never dream’. But equally, he noted that those with ‘no conspicuous courage’ of their own ‘may perform prodigies of valour under the inspiring influence of the corporate spirit’.
Southport in general and Banks in particular also has tremendous form in Non-Conformist history, especially in Primitive Methodism. For example, in 1921, Christiana Hartley became the first woman to be mayor of Southport. She was from a committed, philanthropic Primitive Methodist family. Her father Sir William Hartley was the founder of the great jam business. His family home was in Banks. It is not only Southport school-children who can learn from the fact well-known locally that Christiana was a Liberal who gave her Southport mayoral salary to a Labour party project which she judged to be best placed to help the most disadvantaged.
This spirit of reaching out is exemplified in our time by Southport’s Shoreline Church’s Green Pastures project which applies the parable of the Good Samaritan to finding accommodation for the homeless.
I have argued that our Foundation should return to its roots as a College, but this time as a virtual one, offering short courses on such topics and encouraging those equally fascinated by the lives of Mollie Batten, Christiana Hartley and other faith-filled pioneers of social justice to pursue Masters by Research. Some will wish to study individuals, others a particular church community or project, such as Green Pastures, or a denomination, such as Primitive Methodists. Two years after the Church of England Congress was held in Southport, the town hosted the Primitive Methodist annual conference of 1928
There is much more to Southport than this summer’s notoriety. In 1915, Rudyard Kipling spoke in Southport, encouraging men to volunteer to fight in the War. The Southport Guardian of 23 June 1915 reported that he ended his speech thus: ‘there used to be a saying which ran: “What Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.” (Applause.) Let us change that saying for three years, or for the duration of the war, to “What Lancashire does to-day, England will do to-morrow.”(Loud applause.) (Southport Guardian, 23 June 1915)
If England does what Southport has done in resisting and rising above the mob this summer, the children will not have died in vain. Local church and educational leaders have reacted perfectly and national figures have visited appropriately, including the Home Secretary, the Prime Minister and the King. Royalty have been received well in Southport from King George V (hence the school, now 6th form college, KGV) and Queen Mary in 1913 through Queen Elizabeth II’s visits and on to the Princess Royal last year, while a statue of Queen Victoria is prominent in the town.
But I suggest we could also benefit from recovering that past practice of churches, and now other faith communities, as well as political parties and the TUC, taking their annual gatherings around the country (as our Foundation does, in our own small way) to come to know a little of diverse places and communities and to learn from them. Perhaps people of faith could gather in Southport in 2026, one hundred years after that Church Congress there? The agenda from 1926 stands the test of time although the line-up would now be more diverse. The two speakers immediately before William Temple were the only women to give main talks, Miss Evelyn Underhill and Mrs Louise Creighton. They spoke of the Spirit in the individual and in the home, respectively, before Temple spoke of the Spirit in the community. Could England, or society in these islands more broadly, do tomorrow what Southport has done this summer and learn from the Congress it hosted a century ago?
Simon Lee is Chair of the board of trustees of the William Temple Foundation
Thanks to the pioneering work of Dr Katya Braginskaia, our Digital Education Lead, the William Temple Foundation is holding a virtual Festival of Public Theology this summer. We look forward to welcoming you, via Zoom, to any or all of the sessions.
Our Foundation’s roots are as a college in particular places, initially in Hawarden in north Wales and ultimately in Rugby, before becoming a Foundation working in partnership with the Manchester Business School, then the University of Chester, and now Goldsmiths College, University of London. The original plan for Temple College was for lay Anglican women to pursue studies in theology. This was seen as a fitting tribute to Archbishop William Temple who, like his own college friends R H Tawney and William Beveridge, was committed all his life to what they called workers’ education or extension courses and which we nowadays call lifelong learning.
There were distinguished principals, teachers and students. E M ‘Mollie’ Barton, Professor Leonard Hodgson and Dr (later Bishop) David Jenkins each served as principal, for instance, with Leonard Hodgson doing so in Rugby while he was also a professor of theology in Oxford. If only the technology had existed then, you can imagine that a virtual Festival of Public Theology with William Temple, Mollie Barton, Leonard Hodgson and David Jenkins would have been inspirational. We will do our best to create opportunities for reflection in that spirit.
William Temple had not been a student of theology himself but he ranged broadly across many disciplines and animated the public square in a faith-filled way. As a pioneer of Jewish-Christian relations, Temple would, I am sure, now welcome the natural evolution into multi-faith lifelong learning and partnerships. He was always prepared to embrace new developments in communication. His radio broadcasts were especially effective. He would have loved this kind of virtual Festival.
In and after lockdown, of course, all colleges have become virtual or hybrid so perhaps there is a way to recover that original intention of a Temple College without having to build, or buy, property and so tether ourselves to a particular part of the country. We are not against materialising in different locations for specific purposes but there are now plenty of colleges, universities, churches and other faith communities with their own buildings, so we intend to build partnerships rather than build yet another edifice.
In this spirit, we have followed Temple’s career path in holding meetings in places where he served as Bishop of Manchester, then Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury. Since lockdown was lifted, we have held our annual meetings in Manchester Cathedral, in the Leeds Church Institute and in Derby Cathedral. This summer we will be at Liverpool Hope University, as we are later this week with an afternoon conference on radical hope. In partnerships, we have also held conferences at Canterbury Cathedral with the University of Kent, in William Temple’s old college, Balliol, in Oxford, and with Hope in Blackburn Cathedral, as Temple created the Diocese of Blackburn, then in 2024, Val Barron and Chris Baker have written about our partnerships in the North-East.
A virtual festival complements those developments and gives access to anyone anywhere. With this in mind, I have been asked why a festival appeals to me? When I was working at Queen’s University Belfast during the Troubles in the 1990s, arts organisations across the Irish Sea were understandably reluctant to visit but there was an annual Belfast Festival at Queen’s, a little like the Edinburgh Festival although in the autumn. It was an oasis of celebration. In my next job, at Liverpool Hope University College in the late 1990s – early 2000s, we developed a graduation festival atmosphere while staff and students created a festival for the creative and performing arts in the campus we developed at Everton, and we took learning opportunities out in partnership across the North West with our Network of Hope. In my next role at Leeds Metropolitan University, I introduced a staff development festival for a week at the start of each September for all three thousand staff, and we created partnerships with cultural and sporting organisations which led the governing body to approve the description of us as ‘a university of festivals and partnerships’. This theme has continued through recent contributions within academe in Cambridge, the Open University and now Aston. My experience of literary festivals, when I have spoken at Edinburgh, Dartington and Cheltenham, has always been stimulating.
I look forward to the same from our inaugural Temple festival! The programme looks exciting, including our guest lecture from Prof James Walters from the London School of Economics. While my own contribution will give me the chance to explore the differences and similarities between law and morality, including how those campaigning to change the law have sometimes made it worse. Having been studying this for some 50 years, I have enjoyed most recently reflecting on why William Temple and his friends a hundred years ago sometimes sought changes in the law, sometimes thought law reform was not the right way forward, and sometimes changed their minds.
Every festival starts with an event, an experiment, a sample, a one-off; some soar, some need to be revised but we believe that this festival could become an annual feature of our Foundation’s life. In announcing this inaugural Festival of Public Theology, therefore, our Foundation is inviting you both to participate in on-line sessions which appeal to you and to engage Katya in conversation about future possibilities via the internet &/or in person. These include whether you would like a micro-credential, for example, to be the sequel to a particular seminar or about some other topic that you would like to see discussed on future occasions. It may be that you have a partnership in mind, which we would welcome. It may be that you think we could return to our roots with the radical idea of a virtual Temple College. Trustees will be meeting the month after the festival for our AGM and annual away-day with our small staff team and our community of research fellows, when we will explore all suggestions and feedback.
This is an open invitation from the Trustees of the William Temple Foundation to those who would like to express an interest in joining our Board. Our charity strives to carry forward the spirit of Archbishop William Temple’s commitment to faith in the public square. A sense of the breadth and depth of our work can be gathered from our website.
We would like the Board itself to reflect that diversity of thought, background and endeavour. Those who can commit pro bono to opening up opportunities for others to reflect on the contributions of diverse faiths and beliefs to public life are most welcome to make contact.
Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish political parties have generally been positive about widening participation in higher education. In Westminster, the Blair government set an ambitious target of half the country going to university but twice broke their manifesto promises not to increase tuition fees, then the Liberal Democrats immediately reneged on their 2010 manifesto commitment to oppose further increases in tuition fees, when offered the chance to join a Coalition government, and now the Conservative Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, seems to have completed a hat-trick of own goals from the biggest English political parties by attacking what he derides as ‘low-value’ degrees from universities which are ‘ripping-off’ students.
Higher education is about higher values than the league table mentality that ascribes ‘low value’ to certain universities or degrees based on graduates’ first destination employment statistics. These are distorted by a variety of factors, including the rhetoric of ‘top universities’ beloved of these politicians, but also the state of the economy for which those politicians have responsibility. University is, in any event, about more than employment, and employment is about more than first destinations.
Rishi Sunak’s first job paid well but many of the graduates of less famous colleges and universities pursue a vocation in, for instance, nursing or teaching, which contribute wonderful value and values to society, despite relatively low pay. The Prime Minister is rightly lauding apprenticeships, sometimes called technical or vocational qualifications, which I too believe deserve parity of esteem with more abstract degrees such as the Prime Minister’s in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. But degrees with a vocation also merit that parity of esteem with vocational training. Indeed, as the words indicate, they have the same roots from the Latin ‘vocare’ to call. Pursuing such a calling is a noble endeavour, whether or not someone else values your life choices.
As I have pointed out at graduations over the years, so-called ‘drop-outs’ from education have gone on to greatness despite their first destinations not matching up to the pay of Rishi Sunak’s. The patron saint of Europe, St Benedict, dropped out of the mainstream over 1500 years ago and went to live as a hermit in a cave. When he was ready to be more sociable, there were attempts by dissidents within the first two communities he established to poison him. This is good experience for leadership in faith communities, universities and politics. Benedict learned resilience and created a Rule which has survived with almost no changes ever since, inspiring many to aspire to live in communities with the highest values. The Rule begins with the injunction to listen. Politicians who pontificate on universities committed to widening partnership seldom spend time visiting such universities and listening to students, staff, governors and alumni who value their diverse experiences.
There is a familiar pattern in university life. A ‘new’ subject is offered at a new university, such as Events Management at Leeds Metropolitan and Bournemouth. This is widely derided but is then copied. By the time I joined Leeds Met, 60 universities were offering the same course. Events from Glastonbury to the Olympics, you might have noticed, are big business but also nourish the soul.
In my time at Leeds Met, our statement of character and vision said that we aimed to be a university of festivals and partnerships. I proposed one of our honorary doctors, Brendan Foster, as Chancellor because he epitomised that social entrepreneurial spirit. In graduations there, I liked to use the metaphor of his Great North Run, the world’s greatest half-marathon, and of the London Marathon. Lifelong learning is a marathon, not a sprint. These mass distance events embrace world-class athletes as well as those of us who are running for fun, for charity or to improve our health and fitness. The latter group do not hold back the elite, if the occasion is well-organised. On the contrary, each inspires the other. The sight of thousands of runners wearing shirts for research into Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s has always stirred the emotions and promoted philanthropy which has helped to lead to the research breakthroughs we are now seeing in the news. The same is true in education. Those attending an extra-mural class, prompted by an interest fostered by television programmes on archaeology, for instance, or a course to help them return to work, are in the same community as world-class researchers and teachers. Each group inspires the other. This was the experience of William Temple, William Beveridge and R H Tawney at Toynbee Hall and in the Workers’ Educational Association at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Pioneering in higher education often comes from the peripheries, from the marginalised, such as the experiments of women’s colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, or the church colleges in the nineteenth century which educated and trained teachers and nurses, which turned under-valued vocations into graduate professions. Other examples abound. For instance, to take an example perhaps closer to the government’s heart, the whole notion of Business Schools has been poached by the oldest universities from the experiments of the polytechnics.
Professor Ian Markham and I have co-edited a book on university life published in this month of Rishi Sunak’s attack on universities and, more positively, this month of many graduations all over the UK. My essay is entitled, ‘The Serendipity of Hope in the Peripheral Vision of a University’. Ian’s, with his colleague Joe Thompson, is on slavery reparations, which they are pioneering in the USA. In between our essays, other contributors include former students, staff, governors and partners. Reading the diverse essays might convince you, or even the Prime Minister, that ‘serendipity’ means more than it is usually taken to indicate, as does ‘hope’, as does ‘university’.
Indeed, the lessons of this book can apply more broadly to the body politic and to the body civic. The way I would put this is that, properly understood, what can really transform individuals, communities and societies is radical hope. Political parties should now be designing programmes for government which live out the spirit of radical hope. Indeed, that is how I would recommend judging their next manifestos, along with monitoring if the winner or winners can find it within themselves to stick to their promises and turn them into action. If they do not, then civic or civil society will do our best anyway, as has been the case for colleges and universities through the ages. This is in the Temple tradition of faith in the public square.
The reason why I call my Twitter account ‘paradoxbridge’ is because I believe there is a paradox in thinking about universities. Everyone knows that Oxford and Cambridge are great universities. But it does not follow that other universities are not great. Even if it did, the people who talk about ‘top’ universities often do not understand what has made Oxford and Cambridge great. It is partly that they are each made up of over thirty smaller communities, called colleges, which means students and staff can get to know one another across disciplines and other divides, while the colleges can experiment, with new courses and new cohorts. It is also because this collegial nature encourages extra-curricular engagement with opportunities to stretch mind, body and soul. These twin strengths are missed when people focus only on traditional degree subjects, such as my own in Law, and only on degree results or first destination employment.
On the contrary, the true genius of university education is that what prove to be the deepest influences on you in the long run are often people, places, experiences, ideas and graces which you hardly noticed when they first came into your student life. At graduations this summer, graduands, families and friends should focus not so much on any short-term worries about first destinations as on the latent value and values which will yield their mysteries in the coming decades, making a difference to our ultimate destinies.
Simon Lee is professor of law at Aston University and emeritus professor of jurisprudence at Queen’s University Belfast. He has led two award-winning institutions committed to widening participation in higher education, Liverpool Hope University College and Leeds Metropolitan University. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and Yale Law School. He is the co-editor, with Ian Markham, of The Serendipity of Hope (published by Pickwick, an imprint of Wipf and Stock, in July 2023). Simon Lee is also the chair of the board of trustees of the William Temple Foundation. @paradoxbridge s.lee19@aston.ac.uk
The William Temple Foundation is a broad church. The first of these Temple Takes by fellow trustee, Dr David Shaw, anticipated the Coronation with a pre-emptive strike against the monarchy. Now it is my turn to offer a different take.
This Foundation explores faith in the public square. Coronations have been a prime example of this in action, over a thousand years. This month’s Coronation was more inclusive than its predecessors of diverse denominations and faiths.
While conceding that the monarchy is ‘a good show’, David Shaw notes ‘that ermine and gold braid costs an awful lot of money’. He was not alone in this approach. The Coronation was dismissed as a ‘pantomime’ of ‘obscene lavishness’ by the journalist Suzanne Breen, writing in the Belfast Telegraph.
Yet the Guardian’s exhaustive investigations concluded that the Coronation cost each UK taxpayer about £1.50. If we had been saving up since the previous Coronation, that would have been just over two pence each per year or, if we think instead of creating a sinking fund for the next one, perhaps ten pence each per year.
Since the last Coronation seventy years ago, the USA has held 19 inaugurations for 13 Presidents. These too have an oath, a ceremony, a prayer, a cathedral service the next day, and there are many inauguration balls. Some of the funding in the USA comes from individual supporters, which might be welcomed here, but some of those donors become ambassadors, which would not be. I would like the Prince of Wales, when his time comes, to adopt the model of Edward VII’s Coronation instead, for which the King opened and personally contributed to an appeal which funded a free Coronation Dinner for half a million of the poorest Londoners. William V would ideally extend its reach throughout the UK, realms and territories. The meals went ahead that summer, in hundreds of locations, when the Coronation itself had to be delayed because of the King’s poor health.
William Temple attended that 1902 Coronation as a gentleman-in-waiting to his father, who was then the Archbishop of Canterbury, and played his own part as the Archbishop of York in the 1937 Coronation of George VI. Temple enjoyed three enthronements of his own at Manchester, York and Canterbury, or four if you count the double enthronement in Canterbury as bishop of that diocese and as Primate of All England. Despite it being in wartime, the Canterbury enthronements saw him in what the Church Times described as a ‘magnificent cope and mitre’. There was gold aplenty. None of this stopped him being one of the founders of the Welfare State.
The other point where I beg to differ from David Shaw is when he imagines that defenders of the monarchy would argue that it only has a ceremonial role whereas it is more than that. The second part of his claim is correct, although he only gives examples of what he sees as self-interested interference by the royal family in the political sphere. There are many positive and practical (as opposed here to ‘ceremonial’) contributions by the contemporary constitutional monarchy which celebrate our charities and the arts, which have been prophetic in warning of the climate crisis, which give voice and opportunities to some of the otherwise voiceless on the margins of society, as in the work of the Prince’s Trust, and which bring all faiths into the public square.
Nevertheless, there is nothing necessarily wrong with ceremonial roles and nor is there anything necessarily wrong with ceremonies. Ceremony itself has its place in the public square. Religious ceremonies in particular merit serious study. Yet a pillar of the British establishment, former editor of The Times, Sir Simon Jenkins, now writing for The Guardian, is more outspoken than David Shaw: ‘Is Britain completely mad? Trying to read meaning into such events is completely hopeless.’
In contrast, Juliet Samuel in The Times, writing in the week before the Coronation, had argued that critics of King Charles III miss the point: ‘What they don’t grasp is why the institution at the centre of this weird ritual, the monarchy, has lasted on and off for more than a thousand years… Where the sceptics see a fuddy-duddy infatuated by new-age nonsense, I see traditional religion informed by modern pluralism.’
Rachel Cooke, in The Observer, could see the pageantry as a ‘preposterous vision’ but considered that, ‘Only a stone-hearted person could fail to have been moved by the multifaith parts of the service, and if you felt nothing when the choir sang Handel’s Zadok the Priest at the king’s anointment, you are either an algorithm or half dead.’
She was also impressed by the military processions’ ‘precision that was unbelievable in a country where nothing works.’ A question for a faith foundation is whether the religious ceremony worked that well. Was it sacramental or quasi-sacramental? Did the anointing bring grace? The sacred music was varied, plentiful and uplifting. Does that make a difference? Was the ritual right? Was the emphasis on service authentic or was it, so to speak, lip-service? Almost nobody approved of the formula in the oath, perhaps not even the King. Nor was the attempt to inveigle us into paying homage well received. When asked if that was his idea, the Archbishop of Canterbury claimed he honestly could not remember. When asked about the gold robes and coach, he did remember that the former were borrowed and that the latter was paid for centuries earlier. He told his interviewer, Julie Etchingham, that there was no need to be miserable about all this.
In all its aspects, each Coronation needs to be reviewed in timely fashion. Meanwhile, if you cannot bring yourself to ponder the faith dimensions of what we have just witnessed, then there are secular rites of passage which have some instructive parallels, such as university graduations. When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, fewer than 4% of the UK’s school-leavers had the opportunity of university education. Nowadays, the figure is more than 50%. With their family members in attendance, this means that more than half the country experience graduation ceremonies. Some of these are in sacred spaces and others also draw on religious liturgies and forms but even the most secular have lessons in understanding the religious Coronation. Some staff might remain, or affect to be, miserable when asked to dress up or otherwise attend but nowadays almost all students, their families and friends find joy in graduations.
It does not need a degree in pageantry to understand the significance in graduations of the medieval gowns, the hoods, the headgear, the university regalia, the music, the formalities of wording, the processions, even in some cases the ermine on a hood or gown or the gold braid on a Chancellor’s gown. Students are burdened by the cost of the degree but only marginally more by any extra cost of graduation tickets for family and friends. They know that gowns and hoods are mostly recycled, as at the Coronation. Those attending can readily understand the concept of a Chancellor, a university’s equivalent to a constitutional monarch, even though they know that the executive power lies elsewhere. Families appreciate the effort to respect a university’s place in the history of education and all their students’ contributions to that community. They value the chance to meet staff, to give thanks and to be thanked for their support.
A Coronation is not just a graduation for the monarch. In a sense, we are all graduands as one era gives way to another. The Coronation was a rite of passage but it was also a leap of faith. Far from it being ‘hopeless’ to read meaning into the Coronation, the meaning was already there. A more charitable reading of our shared experience is that the Coronation extolled the virtue of hope for faith in the public square.
Simon Lee is Professor of Law & Director of Research, Aston Law School; Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence, Queen’s University Belfast; and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the William Temple Foundation
Exactly 250 years ago today, on 1st January 1773, the words of Amazing Grace were first heard here in Olney, Buckinghamshire. They were composed by the Reverend John Newton to accompany his sermon. In the following century, they were set to the tune we associate with Newton’s words.
The same judge who heard the Tobias Rustat case about, and in, Jesus College, Cambridge in 2022 had granted a faculty in 2021 to the Church of St Peter & St Paul, Olney, to present a more balanced account of Reverend John Newton ahead of today’s anniversary. Chancellor Hodge QC’s conclusion was that,
‘The planned changes to the eastern end of the south aisle of the church are designed to bring into regular and beneficial use what is presently a little-used area of the church and to ensure that it is available to educate visitors, in a balanced way, about John Newton, his life and his work, and to celebrate his later, and worthy, achievements whilst not overlooking or in any way seeking to diminish his earlier sins. The proposals will enhance the significance of the church through its strong connections with John Newton; and they will have no adverse or negative impact upon the significance of the church building. The four pews that will be removed are of no intrinsic, practical, or historical significance; and they will not be lost to the church. Rather, the proposals are entirely positive in terms of their impact. As the ‘Home of Amazing Grace’, with significant connections with John Newton and William Cowper, the church already attracts thousands of visitors every year; and the changes that are being proposed will only serve to enhance the visitors’ experience, thereby enhancing the church’s mission. The new displays will serve to remind the worshipping congregation and visitors alike that Jesus came “to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5, 32). They will also bring to mind the true saying of Saint Paul, worthy of all to be received: “That Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1, 15) as we are instructed during the Service of Holy Communion according to the Book of Common Prayer. From the material that has been presented to me, it would appear that the church are alive to the need both to ensure that there is appropriate diversity amongst the presenters of materials which are to be displayed within the church, and to recognise the vital contributions made to the abolition of the vile trade in human flesh by African and other global majority heritage writers and abolitionists, women and working class reformers rather than simply focusing upon the work of prominent, white, upper and middle class male abolitionists like John Newton and William Wilberforce.’
In an era of cancellation, how has this legacy of a former slave-trader survived? It was an act of redemption but its lasting impact has been helped considerably by other creative acts of genius through the ages. John Newton’s eighteenth century words were blessed fifty years later by the American William Walker who set Amazing Grace in the 1830s to variations on a folk tune known as New Britain, and who popularised this version through his entrepreneurial and religious vocation of selling hymnals. Amazing Grace was revived in popular culture in the second half of the twentieth century. In 2015, it was used to great effect by President Barack Obama in his eulogy for Reverend Clem Pinckney, one of the Black Christians murdered in their own church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white gunman they had welcomed into their worshipping community. Just looking at the point where the President began to sing, on YouTube, is graceful enough but it is worth watching or listening to the whole eulogy to appreciate the beautiful way in which President Obama introduced grace earlier in his oration and, especially, around the assumption that the murderer would have had about how his victims’ relatives, friends and church community would react, where President Obama made this unattributed allusion to another insight from Olney, this time by Newton’s friend, the poet William Cowper,
‘Oh, but God works in mysterious ways’ lightly paraphrasing the opening line of Cowper’s 1773 hymn, ‘God moves in a mysterious way’.
Instead of nursing a grievance, the community’s reaction was a measured, forgiving kind of grieving, an amazing grace, to which the President added beyond measure. The congregation is electrified by this phrase 16 minutes into the eulogy. Then President Obama begins to talk about grace. He gives a moving reason why sometimes a symbol should be removed, talking about how amazing it would be for the state of South Carolina to take down the Confederate flag in recognition that slavery was wrong. He links this back to God’s grace and faces squarely political controversies around race discrimination in employment and around gun laws. This eulogy is one of the greatest of contributions to the public square. It was only after 35 minutes that President Obama began to sing Amazing Grace.
On this 250th anniversary, then, it is timely to reflect on how we add to legacies and how they are linked. For example, I think it mattered that Newton lived here in Olney, with Cowper and all those oppressed in the lace industry and other disadvantaged circumstances, just as it mattered that Temple, Beveridge and Tawney lived in Toynbee Hall, in the midst of poverty, after their privileged time together as students. Newton and Cowper tried to help the poorest of their neighbours but also learned from them. They exchanged stories of Cowper’s life-threatening mental health issues and of Newton’s life-threatening journeys, including his shipwreck off the northern coast of Ireland.
Listening to Amazing Grace, which might have been directed to him, was thought to be William Cowper’s last experience in church and this hymn might have been his last. I gave the year, 1773, but it was actually in January, indeed in the next day or so after Amazing Grace, before another suicidal episode.
How amazing that, here in this little town of Olney, within hours of each other, Newton wrote the world’s favourite hymn and Cowper wrote the wondrous phrase that is so often echoed, as by President Obama, and which is often assumed to be a Biblical verse, but which was his original expression, about God moving in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.
I think Cowper might have drawn on the Giant’s Causeway and the storm in which his friend Newton almost died in the imagery of his opening stanza. Unlike Newton’s Amazing Grace, this example of Cowper’s genius has not yet benefited from such a fitting tune. So I wonder if, in death as in life, Newton (whose fame for this itself depends so much on the American Walker’s yoking of his words to the amazing New Britain tune) could come to the aid of his friend, Cowper. Since both hymns are in that 8, 6, 8, 6 syllable-rhythm, and bearing in mind President Obama’s intertwining of the two friends’ words, could ‘God moves in a mysterious way’ be sung to Amazing Grace’s New Britain tune? Might that be one small legacy from the celebrations here today, and around the world, of the 250th anniversary of Amazing Grace?
‘God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform He plants his footsteps in the sea And rides upon the storm.’
Simon Lee lives in Olney and is the Chair of the Trustees of the William Temple Foundation, Professor of Law, Aston University, and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence, Queen’s University Belfast
