The Bishop's Ghosts

Even by the unfettered standards of Britain's Anglican hierarchy, the Bishop of Southwark is known as a bold and outspoken churchman. In addition to sponsoring a host of adventurous urban missions, the Rt. Rev. Mervyn Stockwood has over the years defended homosexuals, denounced Anglican policy on divorce as cowardly, told ribald stories in public and revealed the drinking habits of his fellow clerics in a book called The Compleat Imbiber.

None of the bishop's statements has raised more eyebrows than two articles in the Times of London this month in which he not only avows his belief in psychic phenomena but insists that he has on at least five occasions communicated with the dead. In one instance, he told re porters, "an elderly, sad-looking woman" actually manifested herself at the foot of his bed. A spiritualist subsequently corroborated the presence of the ghost and was able to pinpoint her precise path through the neo-Georgian mansion.

"This is where you hear the apparition," the medium told the bishop outside his bedroom. "You hear it coming down the hall. It comes along, pffft, here."

His Siamese cat Winky apparently is also psychically sensitive. Whenever the apparition appears, says the bishop, Winky's fur stands on end.

Seances and Psi. Stockwood is not the only Anglican clergyman to dabble in telepathy, seances and other "psi" phenomena. He happens to be vice president of a group called the Churches Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies, whose patrons include 20 bishops of the Anglican Communion. One of the fellowship's basic concerns is with what it considers a "highly agnostic" trend: the diminution of belief in the traditional Christian doctrine of life after death. Not only does such skepticism deny comfort to the kin of the dead, says the fellowship, but it raises profound questions about "what the raison d'etre of the church can really be."

Lately the psychical enthusiasts have been asking these questions of the church itself. In a letter to last year's Lambeth Conference, the fellowship petitioned the church to reopen a 1937 inquiry into spiritualism undertaken under the auspices of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Although the report was never officially published, it held that there were enough instances of inexplicable psychic events for Anglican clergymen to "keep in touch with groups of intelligent persons who believe in spiritualism." The fellowship also urged the addition of parapsychology to the curriculum of Anglican seminaries. In this way, the letter said, young clergymen would be able to provide more "adequate apologetic answers to the great problems of life and death."

Thus far the demands have evoked no formal response. Nor are they likely to. More traditional churchmen consider spiritualism an outright violation of the Biblical injunctions against the occult. If a Christian seeks from spiritualism what he cannot find in his own faith, warns an article in the Anglican quarterly, Modern Churchman, he is not "far from the sin of Lucifer--the sin of pride." Nonetheless, Stockwood claims that his pieces in the Times produced hundreds of letters from believers who are convinced that they too have had ghostly visitors.

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