Altrincham Attacks Church Of England

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28794, 15 January 1959, Page 9

Altrincham Attacks Church Of England

(Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, January 14. Lord Altrincham, whose comments on the monarchy caused a national controversy, hit out again yesterday—this time at the Church of England, according to the “News Chronicle.” He made his attack in a new newspaper for the Birmingham diocese. Under the heading: “If I Were Archbishop of Canterbury,” Lord /Itrincham said he would refuse to attend pompous evening functions, such as lord mayor's banquets, "dressed in knee breeches with a braided coat hung with decorations like a Christmas tree.”

Lord Altrincham said a Christian priest must not look like a courtier or a grandee. If anything, he must look like—indeed, in a sense, he must be—a beggar. He also said that Anglicanism

should become more of a form of Ghandhi-style Christianity. The greatest Christian since Christ was Ghandhi, who did not merely preach religion but lived and died for it and yet was unable to join any of the Christian sects, he said. Lord Altrincham said that the present state of the Church of England was "rather laughable.

“It resists the authoritarian claims of the papacy, and its clergy get very hot under their dog collars if the Pope propounds some new and highly indigestible dogma. “Yet the Anglican church Itself asserts a bqdy of doctrine which no sane man can accept as necessarily true for all men,” he said. Lord Altrincham said that if he were the Archbishop of Canterbury he would on occasions turn against the secular powers “with I all the thunder I could command.

“At the time of Suez I would have done very much more than either of the Archbishops to arouse the conscience of the nation.

“And when the Notting Hill race riots occurred I would have asked the British Broadcasting Corporation to give me five or 10 minutes to explain and condemn the iniquity of racialism in all its forms.”

He ended, according to the “News Chronicle," by saying: “Most English parsons are happier talking about a test match than about the Resurrection.”