Michael Cantuar

"I have, alas, only one illusion left," admitted 19th century English Clergyman Sydney Smith, "and that is the Archbishop of Canterbury."

Americans who view the Primate of All England as the final personification of the formidable, ceremonious English Establishment are unlikely to be disillusioned by the sight of the 100th Archbishop, who this week begins a 23-day tour of the U.S. A huge, shambling man, with fierce tufts of white hair and shaggy eyebrows jutting from his massive head, Arthur Michael Ramsey, 57, looks constantly at the ready to don cope and miter for the crowning of a Queen or the intonation of a weighty pronouncement. "When you see him in the Abbey, enrobed and preaching on Christmas, he and the church are one," says one of his vicars. "He is the church."

But Michael Ramsey is also a complex churchman who is facing complex 20th century problems. A Cambridge-trained scholar and theologian, he came to Canterbury with a reputation for both deep spirituality and donnish wit--a man unwilling to compromise his own stern theology, but so fond of epigrams that he gives them up for Lent. Frankly at home in high-church ceremony, he nonetheless seems at times the amiable country parson, enjoying simple amusement in self-deflation. Archbishop Ramsey always signs his name "Michael Cantuar"--the traditional Latin abbreviation for Canterbury --but he sometimes autographs pictures "Michael, Archbishop of Canterbury," joking that the longer title "seems to give the people more for their money."

Battling Indifference. Michael Cantuar heads a church that some think is almost illusory despite its established position. Although 27 million Englishmen are baptized as Anglicans, fewer than 10 million are confirmed members, and only 3,000,000 are regular communicants. The church is short on priests and short on reform, and after 15 months at Lambeth Palace, Ramsey does not underestimate the seriousness of the plight.

"The major problem facing us," he says, "is of religion itself, of promoting religion in a country and a world where people are indifferent to it." For the specific problems, Ramsey has prescribed some solid measures. Through widespread recruitment and expansion of training facilities, the margin of new clergymen over deaths and retirements is slowly beginning to widen; and last week the church got its first fulltime recruiter of clergymen.

Ramsey is more and more concerned about public issues, as though heeding such critics as Author J. B. Priestley, who wrote recently that the Church of England "spends too much time dressing itself up and not enough time dressing other people down." The Archbishop fights capital punishment, advocates general (though not unilateral) disarmament, spoke out vehemently in the House of Lords against the bill to slow nonwhite immigration from other Commonwealth countries. Last week the church proposed the establishment of a National Council of Alcoholism--predicated on the recognition that alcoholism is a disease rather than a moral flaw. In the continuing English debate on laws concerning prostitution, homosexuality and adultery, Ramsey holds that "morality is not best promoted by giving criminal status to every kind of grievous sin."

Disestablishment. The reforms that scholarly Michael Ramsey wants most are in Anglican worship and in the church's control over its own affairs. Early in his primacy, Ramsey set up a committee to suggest a new method of choosing bishops, who for four centuries have been appointed by the King, traditionally on the recommendation of the Prime Minister. He has also ordered reform in the Book of Common Prayer, unchanged since 1662. By introducing the prayer book revisions experimentally and in stages, Ramsey hopes to avoid a direct conflict with Parliament, which flatly turned down a prayer book revision in 1928. Yet the Archbishop leaves little doubt about his willingness to leave the convenient embrace of the state if necessary: "I think we can get the reforms we need without that. But I would choose disestablishment rather than have those reforms made impossible."

Ramsey also applies this pragmatism to the ecumenical movement. He is one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, has continued his longtime scholarly interest in the Orthodox Church with the first visit to the Soviet Union by an Archbishop of Canterbury, and last spring ordered the revival of ecumenical conversations with the Church of Scotland. He warns that unity is "not just togetherness with one another," but getting together with the Roman Catholic Church is simplified for High Churchman Ramsey by the feeling that he never left it. An old Ramsey epigram: "When an Anglican is asked, 'Where was your church before the Reformation?', his best answer is to put the counterquestion, 'Where was your face before you washed it?''

Although the Archbishop believes that administration is "something to be got on with and not deified,'' he finds that more and more time must be spent in his Lambeth Palace study bending over his oldfashioned lapboard on details of running "All England." But he spends a greater proportion of his time at Canterbury than did his predecessor--brisk Organization Man Geoffrey Fisher--and hopes to remain more of a spiritual leader than a church administrator.

On his U.S. visit. Ramsey will strengthen ties between Anglicans and Episcopalians, will receive four honorary degrees. He plans to deliver at least six lectures, a dozen sermons. Says an administrative bishop: "He wants to lecture and to meet theologians and theological students--that's his main reason for coming."

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